What Makes a Diaspora?

The word diaspora comes from a Greek term meaning scattering, and it was long used for the dispersal of Jewish communities after the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE. Today scholars use it more widely for groups who live outside an ancestral homeland but keep a collective memory and sense of connection to it. In 1991 William Safran proposed criteria such as a myth of the homeland and a wish to return, and in 1997 Robin Cohen identified types including victim, labour, trade and imperial diasporas.

Armenian communities after 1915, the Irish after the famine and the Lebanese spread across the Americas and West Africa all fit different types. Critics warn that the term can be stretched until it means any migrant group, and that it can hide divisions within communities. The concept helps explain how identity can stretch across borders and generations.