The word ‘diaspora’ has leapt from its previously confined use – mainly concerned with the dispersion of Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Africans away from their natal homelands – to cover the cases of many other ethnic groups, nationalities and religions. But this ‘horizontal’ scattering of the word to cover the mobility of many groups to many destinations, has been paralleled also by ‘vertical’ leaps, with the word diaspora being deployed to cover more and more phenomena and serve more and more objectives of different actors.

In The Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, over 40 scholars from many countries have explored the evolving use of the concept of diaspora, its possibilities as well as its limitations, includes sections on ‘debating the concept’, ‘complexity’, ‘home and home-making’, and ‘connections’ and ‘critiques’.

Robin Cohen is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies and Senior Research Fellow, Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

Carolin Fischer, who completed her DPhil at ODID in 2015, is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Her current work examines how migrant descendants experience, interpret, appropriate and modify otherness in their everyday lives.

Robin Cohen and Carolin Fischer (eds) (2018) Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies, Routledge