| Introduction
This book is about how the politics of one country plays itself out in another through the presence and agency of migrants and refugees. It is about transnational mobilization and strategies of migrants and refugees, and the way that such engagement is perceived by political actors in their country of settlement and origin. Diasporas, such as the Jewish and Armenian, are known for their continuous engagement in their homelands. Yet, increasingly all types of migrants and refugees are no longer assumed to make a sharp break with their country of origin. Air travel, electronic communication, satellite television, and the Internet render geographical distances relatively insignificant. Migrants and refugees may, therefore, retain or develop interest in, and engagement with, political developments in their homeland with greater intensity than previously. This can result in anything from the formation of solidarity groups with persecuted movements to the defence of the homeland political regime. In this way, migrants and refugees become a linkage group between their receiving country and their homeland. The distinctive forms of migrant politics introduce the politics of their homeland into their country of settlement and provide an external dimension to the politics of their country of origin by acting as a resource for political allies. Politics and democracy are thus less bounded by state borders.
Migrants’ and refugees’ transnational political engagement in their homelands raise sensitive issues regarding dual loyalty, the mobilization and manipulation of political power, and the influence of transnationalism on national and international systems. Indeed, the presence in one country of ‘transnational communities’ or ‘diasporas’, that is, immigrants or exiles whose social, economic and political universe reaches beyond state borders to their homeland, has been proclaimed to constitute an increasingly important feature of not only contemporary domestic politics but also transnational and international relations (Sheffer 1986; Huntington 1997; Adamson 2002). Certainly, the phenomenon of migrants’ transnational political networks and practices goes to the core of one of the central issues within political science: the fading dichotomy between the domestic and the international. Migrants’ transnational political networks and practices challenge state-bound assumptions about political communities and societies underlying so much of the social science literature... | 
