Special Issues

Global Networks will consider publishing up to 2 special issues a year. Proposals should be discussed with or sent to the Editor at the earliest opportunity; a brief outline, paper titles (usually no more than 6-8 depending on length and including an introduction) and abstracts should be provided where possible. All papers in special issues must go through the peer review process.

- Forthcoming

World City Networks and Global Commodity Chains
Guest editors: Ben Derudder, Frank Witlox and Céline Rozenblat

- Published

Vernacularization on the ground: local uses of global women's rights in Peru, China, India and the United States
Guest editors: Peggy Levitt and Sally Engle Merry

Development, space and place: hometown associations in Africa
Guest editors: Ben Page, Claire Mercer and Martin Evans

This collection continues the multi-disciplinary exploration of diaspora communities through a set of empirical studies of African global networks ‘connected’ to Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. In addition to discussing the relationship between space, place and transnationalism these papers bring another interlocutor to the debate, namely studies of international development processes. This is always a fraught move because of development’s weighty normative baggage, yet it is necessary because of the increasing policy interest in the relationship between migration and international development. The key transnational connection and core social relationship that is the focus of all the papers here is that between migrants and their homelands; for some writers this is the essence of contemporary transnationalism. But where this shades into a conscious discussion of ‘improving home’ it has inevitably also entered into the discourse of development. Within this context the papers address the role of African hometown associations. These associations have historically been one of the key vehicles through which diaspora communities have engaged with improving the place that is ‘home’.