How do the Global South Diasporas Mobilize for Transnational Political Change?

TL;DR

This paper explores how the Bangladeshi diaspora used social media, remittances, and strategic actions to influence political change during the 2024 quota reform movement, introducing the concept of 'diasporic superposition' to describe their hybrid influence.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of 'diasporic superposition' to explain diaspora influence and extends postcolonial computing and financial technology scholarship in transnational activism.

Findings

Diaspora mobilized through social platforms and remittance flows.

Four phases of collective action identified: engagement, network building, remittance boycott, and adaptive responses.

Introduced 'diasporic superposition' as a new theoretical framework.

Abstract

This paper examines how non-resident Bangladeshis mobilized during the 2024 quota-reform turned pro-democracy movement, leveraging social platforms and remittance flows to challenge state authority. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we identify four phases of their collective action: technology-mediated shifts to active engagement, rapid transnational network building, strategic execution of remittance boycott, reframing economic dependence as political leverage, and adaptive responses to government surveillance and information blackouts. We extend postcolonial computing by introducing the idea of "diasporic superposition," which shows how diasporas can exercise political and economic influence from hybrid positionalities that both contest and complicate power asymmetries. We reframe diaspora engagement by highlighting how migrants participate in and reshape homeland politics, beyond narratives of integration in host countries. We advance the scholarship on financial technologies by foregrounding their relationship with moral economies of care, state surveillance, regulatory constraints, and uneven international economic power dynamics. Together, these contributions theorize how transnational activism and digital technologies intersect to mobilize political change in Global South contexts.