This study examines how Chinese migrants are discursively constructed through mainstream press coverage in Spain in the wake of COVID-19. Focusing on coverage in El País (centre-left) and El Mundo (centre-right), the analysis draws on critical discourse analysis to examine 81 news articles published between 2020 and 2025. The findings show that Chinese migrants are predominantly positioned within homogeneous and stereotypical frames that mark them as peripheral outsiders to Spanish society. Despite ideological differences, both newspapers rely on similar media agendas—particularly integration, culture, and crime—through which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are discursively produced. El Mundo , as a conservative press, focuses on constructing a universe of crimes with collective and generalized images of Chinese immigrants, based on the traditional news production routine of the Western press that represents immigration as a threat for the host society. In contrast, El País , as a liberal-minded newspaper, implicitly conveys discriminatory discourses, transmitting racism through its critics and cultural concerns. By foregrounding processes of hierarchy, normalization, and exclusion, this study contributes to debates on ethnicity, migration, and media by demonstrating how everyday journalistic practices reproduce otherness and internal differentiation within migrant communities in a Southern European context.
How have African states classified their populations after independence, and what became of the colonial census categories ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘tribe,’ through which empire organized populations? Existing research provides rich accounts of census classification in individual African countries and cross-national analysis of ‘ethnicity’ during particular census rounds, but we lack a continent-wide, longitudinal account of how racial and ethnic classification has changed across post-colonial Africa. Drawing on an original dataset of 211 census questionnaires from 53 African countries between 1955 and 2024, this paper provides such an account. I combine systematic coding of the presence and absence of ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ and ‘tribe’ with case-by-case analysis of questionnaire wording and category schemes to trace historical trends, colonial legacies, and cross-national variation. Three findings stand out. First, most post-colonial censuses do not explicitly enumerate any of the three concepts, making non-naming a central feature of the classificatory landscape. Second, where states enumerate them, the concepts follow divergent trajectories: ‘race’ becomes increasingly rare after the early post-independence period, ‘tribe’ declines substantially, and ‘ethnicity’ becomes the most prevalent but remains uneven across countries and over time. Third, empires structure but do not determine these trajectories. Former British colonies exhibit the greatest plurality of classificatory terms, while former French colonies rely almost exclusively on ‘ethnicity.’ Case-by-case analysis reveals striking diversity and fluidity in how race and ethnicity are defined, overlapped, and transformed across space and time. By mapping these trajectories across seven decades, the paper provides the first longitudinal empirical baseline for understanding how post-colonial African states have remade colonial forms of racial and ethnic difference. It reveals patterns that existing theories do not fully explain, positioning Africa as an important site for advancing research on state classification, racial and ethnic formation, and the transformation of colonial legacies.
This article examines the political mobilisation of the Belarusian diaspora in Poland in the context of the overlapping crises that have reshaped Belarusian society since 2020. In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election widely regarded by international observers as neither free nor fair, and the mass political repression that followed, Belarusians residing abroad began to assume roles traditionally associated with a domestic democratic opposition. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 and the complicity of the Belarusian regime in this aggression resulted in a further transformation of the diaspora’s orientation, towards a firm position condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. A third crisis, which began in 2023, is characterised by escalating transnational repression by the Belarusian regime, aimed at limiting the political activism of the diaspora. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews, document analysis, and participant observation conducted between 2020 and 2025, the study conceptualises the Belarusian diaspora as a transnational social movement and analyses its evolving political strategies through the lenses of mobilisation theory and democratisation scholarship complemented by insights from conflict transformation approach. This perspective allows to examine how successive and overlapping crises transform the actors, relations, and spaces through which political contestation between the Belarusian regime and democratic opposition unfolds. In particular, the displacement of civil society and democratic opposition combined with the extension of authoritarian repression across borders, has increasingly transnationalised this political contestation. The paper contends that within the context of a polycrisis, wherein political repression, war, and transnational authoritarianism intersect, the Belarusian diaspora performs functions associated with civil society and democratic opposition in exile and has come to the fore as a pivotal, yet precarious political actor facing growing challenges to its cohesion, resources, and long-term sustainability.
Diasporas’ versatile roles as victims of conflict, participants in conflict and agents of peacebuilding have been widely explored. We observe that diaspora contributions to ongoing conflicts and subsequent peacebuilding mechanisms have long been framed through a binary lens. Until recently, in both academic and policy debates, diasporas were frequently cast either as “peacemakers,” contributing to reconciliation, reconstruction, and dialogue, or as “peace wreckers,” fuelling violence, sustaining grievances, and prolonging conflicts from afar. Although recent studies have mostly moved away from this approach, this dichotomy has provided a convenient heuristic for categorising diaspora engagement in homeland conflicts and has shaped much of the empirical and normative literature in this field. Despite this growing empirical visibility, dominant analytical frameworks in international relations and peace and conflict studies have struggled to adequately conceptualise diaspora agency. In this special issue, we seek to advance current debates on diasporas in peace and conflict by moving beyond this reductive peacemaker/peace wrecker dichotomy. While existing literature has made important strides in recognising the transnational roles diasporas play, we argue for a more nuanced understanding of the ambivalent, shifting, and context-specific ways in which diaspora actors relate to conflict and peacebuilding processes. The articles included in this special issue provide a multidimensional analysis of diaspora politics, examining diasporas’ complex political agency and vulnerability, what determines and constrains their mobilization, and how they deal with internal divisions during times of conflict.
While there is a broad literature on the policies of authoritarian regimes toward their populations abroad, we know far less about the inclusionary and exclusionary policies of authoritarian host states toward displaced populations residing within their own territories. This article examines how Uyghur refugees who fled China and arrived in Turkey via third countries between 2014 and 2016 were channelled into conflict zones in Syria through the interaction of state institutions, diaspora organisations, and armed non-state actors. The findings show that a humanitarian migration corridor used by a vulnerable refugee population was transformed into a strategic instrument in line with geopolitical and ideological objectives. Rather than viewing this process solely through the lens of homeland repression, the article demonstrates how authoritarian governance, diaspora networks, and armed non-state actors became intertwined in shaping the trajectories of forced migrants. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of ungrievable lives, the study argues that Turkey’s authoritarian turn rendered Uyghur refugees legally precarious and politically disposable, while armed non-state actors exploited their vulnerability for ideological purposes. Together, these dynamics facilitated the instrumentalization of refugees in pursuit of geopolitical and ideological objectives.
