This study introduces a translation perspective to analyze the policy harmonization process, highlighting imitation, brokering, and editing in shaping policy dynamics at EU and national levels. The translation perspective emphasizes that while policy development is ongoing, the protracted process signals a shift in EU‐wide coordination of skilled labor migration. We show how ongoing translation efforts have transformed the coordination of skilled labor migration across the EU, as labor migration policies have translated into each other, resulting in mutual transformation. The study provides insights into the complex processes of policy harmonization via the Blue Card, enhancing understanding of EU labor migration policy. The findings demonstrate the continuous nature of policy translation between multiple contexts. The article traces developments surrounding the EU Blue Card Directive, including a parallel scheme in Austria, offering insights into skilled migration policy dynamics beyond linear diffusion models.

Diaspora governance strategies are part of an increasingly vibrant academic and policy debate. International organisations play a significant role in promoting diaspora institutions, collaborating with home states, diaspora communities, and other stakeholders. In post‐conflict states, the involvement, and evolving roles of international organisations, among a variety of actors in diaspora institution building, is implicit but has been underresearched. This article analyses a diaspora mapping exercise led by the IOM to demonstrate how an institutional logics perspective can help to better understand how such processes unfold. Taking an organisational perspective, it sheds light on the interplay among international organisations, state agencies, local government, and individual actors in diaspora and development. By focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina, the study offers insights into the challenges and opportunities in diaspora engagement in post‐conflict countries. It underscores the need for further research and the long‐term implications of international organisations' efforts in diaspora development programs and diaspora governance.

ABSTRACT Scholarship on diaspora political engagement is unfolding in novel ways exploring the participation of second-generation diaspora individuals and engagement patters of authoritarian and hybrid regimes. Focusing on the unique role of diaspora politicians, I contend that these individuals adeptly leverage their identity to impact politics and advocate for change. The article demonstrates their adaptability in different settings and evolving advocacy strategies. The article employs a multilingual analysis of social media, public interviews, and public appearances in Germany and Bosnia and Herzegovina using an exploratory case study of a German-Bosnian politician. This exploration underscores their flexibility and evolving advocacy dynamics. Furthermore, it illustrates the way these politicians enhance their profiles within the countries where they’ve been elected and in countries of their descent. This serves to strengthen their chances of re-election on one hand while also drawing attention to authoritarian tendencies, potentially clearing a path for democratic advancement on the other.

This collective discussion brings together six women scholars of and from the post-Yugoslav space, who, using personal experiences, analyze the dynamics of knowledge production in international relations (IR), especially regarding the post-Yugoslav space. Working in Global North academia but with lived experiences in the region we study, our research is often subjected to a particular gaze, seeped in assumptions about “ulterior” motives and expectations about writing and representation. Can those expected to be objects of knowledge ever become epistemic subjects? We argue that the rendering of the post-Yugoslav space as conflict-prone and as Europe's liminal semi-periphery in the discipline of IR cannot be decoupled from the rendering of the region and those seen as related to it as unable to produce knowledge that, in mainstream discussions, is seen as valuable and “objective.” The post-Yugoslav region and those seen as related to it being simultaneously postcolonial, postsocialist, and postwar, and characterized by marginalization, complicity, and privilege in global racialized hierarchies at the same time, can make visible specific forms of multiple colonialities, potentially creating space for anti- and/or decolonial alternatives. We further make the case for embracing a radical reflexivity that is active, collaborative, and rooted in feminist epistemologies and political commitments.

This paper integrates a different perspective into the diaspora literature, by placing it within the frame of digital diasporas and war time engagement in actions and initiatives traditionally considered as diplomatic. We reconstruct how digital diaspora diplomacy developed during a time when the Internet was relatively new and diplomatic tools were limited due to an ongoing conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We examine BOSNET, an online epistemic community of Bosnian diaspora IT pioneers, with a shared set of normative and principled set of beliefs about the independence of their homeland, and collected, shared and spread information about what was going on in their country. We label their work as ‘policy innovation’ engagement and performativity as 'informal' behaviour, as it was unscripted, uncoded and unregulated by any written conventions or state strategies.

ABSTRACT Transitional justice and diaspora studies are interdisciplinary and expanding fields of study. Finding the right combination of mechanisms to forward transitional justice in post-conflict polities is an ongoing challenge for states and affected populations. Diasporas, as non-state actors with increased agency in homelands, host-lands, and other global locations, engage with their past from a distance, but their actions are little understood. This introductory article to a special issue develops a novel framework to study causal mechanisms and their underlying analytical rationales – emotional, cognitive, symbolic/value-based, strategic, and networks-based – linking diasporas and local actors in transitional justice. Mechanisms featured are: thin sympathetic response and chosen trauma, fear and hope, contact and framing, cooperation and coalition-building, brokerage, patronage, and connective action, among others. The contributors theorize about causal mechanisms and their sequences involving diasporas in multi-sited transitional justice processes and bring empirical evidence from various world regions.

ABSTRACT Diaspora actors demonstrate their ability to play a role in a variety of political and social processes in their homelands, including transitional justice. Transnational diaspora memorialization initiatives have become embedded and sustained within different contexts. This paper examines how the causal mechanism of coordination affects memorialization initiatives. It compares memorialization efforts in two localities in Bosnia and Herzegovina with different levels of coordination between diaspora, returnees, and local institutional actors. Centralized coordination with the help of a homeland institution enriches existing memory narratives and aims to forward transitional justice. Memorialization and commemorative practices initiated by diaspora without homeland institutional backing can lead to coordination among a more diverse set of actors, ultimately fostering new, alternative, and more inclusive memory narratives.