The Domestic Abroad

In recent years, a significant number of developing nations have made moves to institutionalize their relationships with their transnational communities, re-conceiving diasporas as being part of a larger "global nation." This marks the rise of the "domestic abroad," or the reassertion of nationalist imaginary and state authority amid neo-liberal restructuring of states.
In Producing the Domestic Abroad, Latha Varadarajan proposes a re-consideration of both the meaning of transnationalism and the nature of national and state identity in global politics. In order to do this, she draws from two literatures that are rarely brought into conversation with IR scholarship: postcolonial theory and historical-materialism, developing her argument through an analysis of the post-1947 Indian state and the relationship between its emergent economic power and its diaspora.