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Maria Koinova

Maria Koinova

Nias Individual Fellow

Project title

Time and Temporalities in Diaspora Politics

Project description

The way time structures everyday activities and long-term strategies of migrants affects their political engagement, from reiterating old traumas to getting quickly involved with their homelands when violence occurs. The interest in studying time and temporalities in migration studies has grown with the advent of mobility studies. Existing studies mostly follow the implications of time on migrants’ everyday lives, not their political activism.

Maria Koinova takes this discussion further and examines how diasporas interpret time and how it affects their identities and political practices in different global locations. Her heuristic framework features different temporalities of diaspora engagement, drawing on findings from an ERC grant “Diasporas and Contested Sovereignty” and further research. The study uses a multi-methods approach, combining individual interviews with results from a cross-national survey in Europe, and seeks to integrate views of both political entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens. This work will culminate in a book, currently under contract for publication with Oxford University Press.

Selected publications

Koinova, Maria, Philippe Blanchard, and Ben Margulies. 2023. “Mixed Methods in an Emerging Research Programme on Diaspora Entrepreneurs and Their Mobilizations,” International Migration Review, published online on 5 June 2023.

Koinova, Maria. 2021. Diaspora Entrepreneurs and Contested States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Published in paperback in 2023.

Koinova, Maria (ed). 2018. “Diaspora Mobilizations for Conflict and Postconflict Reconstruction,” special issue in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44 (8), introduction: 1251-1269.