Fifteen Eighty Four

States have an ambivalent relationship to their nationals abroad. In some cases, states actively support and protect their communities abroad, for example when rescuing their citizens from conflict zones or from areas that were struck by natural disasters. In other cases, states co-opt and exploit their communities abroad. They reach out to them in order to tap into, thus benefit domestically, from their economic potential (e.g., remittances) or to garner political support (e.g., through overseas voting). In still other cases, states repress or coerce communities abroad, thus conceiving the latter not as an asset but as a possible challenge or threat that needs to be controlled.

But what drives states’ varying relationships with their national communities abroad? We suggest that four factors should be taken into account in terms of whether, how, and for what purposes states actually reach out to their nationals abroad. One factor concerns the characteristics of the national communities abroad, including their geographic location and their domestic relevance for their home state, most notably regarding remittances. A second factor relates to institutional aspects of the home state, for example whether legal (at times even constitutional) provisions exist to assist their citizens abroad and whether dedicated institutions (all the way up to ministries) have been set up to that end. A third factor that influences states’ ability to interact with national communities abroad results from state capacity in the political, economic, or military realms. Finally, regime type can be another driver for states’ interactions with their nationals abroad. While democracies should have a greater obligation for a “duty of care,” autocracies might ascribe greater salience to national communities abroad, not least in terms of possible sources of protest that in the final analysis may affect regime survival.

Our survey of the interaction of a total of twelve states from both the Global South and the Global North—namely India, Mexico, Russia, China, Pakistan, Philippines, United Kingdom, Indonesia, Germany, Egypt, Türkiye, and United States—with their national communities abroad suggests that while all of the aforementioned factors play a role, some are more important than others. Geographic proximity clearly plays a role, in the sense of the closer, larger groups of nationals abroad are, the more relevant they tend to become. On the other hand, the existence of legal provisions may or may not determine the intensity of states’ interaction with their nationals abroad. The latter’s economic relevance, however, does prove crucial, most notably for countries whose economic viability depends on remittances or other financial inflows from their communities abroad (e.g., investments). In turn, there is no linear relationship between state capacity and state action. If anything, states with greater state capacity tend to focus less on their communities abroad than those with weaker capacity. Regime type provides a similarly ambiguous picture, not least in terms of transnational repression. While autocracies tend to act both more systematically and more decisively against certain groups of their national communities abroad which they perceive as a challenge to the regime, acts of transnational repression are by no means alien to democracies, something that we refer to as “democratic repression.”

Several additional themes emerge from the country surveys. For starters, the very definition of national communities abroad is highly contested, with states typically being rather generous in their accounting efforts. Also, while material considerations pertaining to (regime) security, political support, or economic development clearly are crucial, states’ interactions with their national communities abroad are also underpinned by non-material considerations, ranging all the way to how national identities are defined. Lastly, for many autocracies there seems to be a disjuncture between the level of militarism at home on the one hand and their willingness, or rather lack thereof, to use military instruments in their interactions with their nationals abroad on the other hand, not least when it comes to assisting them in situations of distress.

In conclusion, states’ efforts to interact with their national communities abroad are here to stay. Increases in human migration in terms of travel, work, and residence resulting from technological developments, better economic opportunities, political instability, and invariably the adverse effects of climate change contribute to population movements. Similarly, advances in communications technology and social media are likely to further increase pressure on governments to interact with their national communities abroad across the spectrum. Against this background, we hope that our volume deepens our understanding concerning whether, how, and for what purposes states engage (or do not) with their nationals abroad.