How do the Global South Diasporas Mobilize for Transnational Political Change?

2026-01-19

AI Summary

This study examines how diasporas from the Global South leverage digital platforms and economic resources to advance political change in their home countries under conditions of state repression. Focusing on the 2024 Bangladesh quota reform movement, it integrates social media analysis, remittance flow tracking, and semi-structured interviews to uncover a four-stage evolution of transnational mobilization by non-resident Bangladeshis. The paper introduces the concept of “diasporic superposition,” challenging conventional diaspora frameworks by highlighting how diasporic actors, situated in hybrid positionalities, simultaneously contest and reconfigure asymmetric power relations. It demonstrates how economic dependency is strategically transformed into political leverage, enabling effective mobilization despite surveillance and information controls, thereby expanding theoretical understandings of digital political activism in the Global South.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Responsible Web: Web for democratic and emancipatory futures
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

This paper examines how non-resident Bangladeshis mobilized during the 2024 quota-reform turned pro-democracy movement, leveraging social platforms and remittance flows to challenge state authority. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we identify four phases of their collective action: technology-mediated shifts to active engagement, rapid transnational network building, strategic execution of remittance boycott, reframing economic dependence as political leverage, and adaptive responses to government surveillance and information blackouts. We extend postcolonial computing by introducing the idea of"diasporic superposition,"which shows how diasporas can exercise political and economic influence from hybrid positionalities that both contest and complicate power asymmetries. We reframe diaspora engagement by highlighting how migrants participate in and reshape homeland politics, beyond narratives of integration in host countries. We advance the scholarship on financial technologies by foregrounding their relationship with moral economies of care, state surveillance, regulatory constraints, and uneven international economic power dynamics. Together, these contributions theorize how transnational activism and digital technologies intersect to mobilize political change in Global South contexts.

Problem

• Global South Diasporas
• Transnational Political Change
• Diasporic Mobilization
• Homeland Politics
• Political Engagement

Innovation

• diasporic superposition
• postcolonial computing
• transnational activism
• financial technologies
• digital mobilization