Description
This paper's objective is to offer a range of theoretical formulations to understand the dynamics and characteristics of inter-generational responsibility embedded in the Rwandan state’s youth diaspora engagement strategies. Political geography research on diaspora and development has generated valuable understandings of the role of the various formal and civic diaspora institutions that generate a ‘moral universe’ (Mohan 2008) of obligations linking people ‘in diaspora’ to development ‘at home’. Despite the recent interest in how histories and futures are conceptualised in development imaginaries and spatial practices (Bunnell et al 2017; Jeffrey and Dyson 2020), the temporalities of diasporic communities’ roles remains under- theorised. This paper centres intergenerational time as a concept mediating the relationship between Rwanda and its diaspora, within the context of development trajectories since the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Drawing on the evolving ethnic, political and economic context of Rwanda , and an ongoing ‘netnography’ of its diaspora institutions, the paper presents four interconnected theoretical frameworks through which to conceptualise articulations of intergenerational time in Rwanda’s youth diaspora engagements: 1) Foucauldian critiques of neoliberal development ideologies that individualise inter-generational responsibility 2) postcolonial theoretical lenses that attend to the relational co-construction and enactment of child–parent–state subject positions 3) theorisations of the prefigurative political practices that pre-empt the future in the management of the present 4) feminist theorisations of migration and inter-generational social reproduction. This discussion contributes to debates over the role of diasporic spaces as significant to transitions between different generations of conflicted-generated diasporas, and the dynamics at play in exchanges between and within diaspora communities and the post-conflict reconstruction of ancestral and origin homelands.| Period | 31 Aug 2021 |
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| Event title | Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference: null |
| Event type | Conference |
| Degree of Recognition | International |