Reaching out, inviting in: Pakistan’s approach to diaspora engagement

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the multi-dimensional approach through which the Pakistani state envisages, cultivates and practices state–diaspora relations. It examines the bureaucratic initiatives and official narratives to understand how the state extends its reach across its borders to bring the overseas population into its domain to fulfil the national agendas. The paper further argues that the state-diaspora relations in Pakistan are being developed through two main shifts: a) the way the state moulds its own identity in relation to the diaspora, and b) the way the state attempts to shape or create a diasporic identity for the overseas population. The paper adopts the analytical lens of why, who and how, to describe the motivations behind diaspora engagement, the discrepancies created between different diaspora groups and modes of engagement with these groups. From a neoliberal governmentality optic, these processes explain how the Pakistani state involves the diaspora members as partners in development, politics and governance and also treats them as subjects of governance and surveillance through identification and categorisation. It concludes that the Pakistani state’s enhanced interest in diaspora engagement is to articulate nationhood in a transnational setting to reconfigure state hegemony in a globalised context.