Diaspora governance strategies are part of an increasingly vibrant academic and policy debate. International organisations play a significant role in promoting diaspora institutions, collaborating with home states, diaspora communities, and other stakeholders. In post‐conflict states, the involvement, and evolving roles of international organisations, among a variety of actors in diaspora institution building, is implicit but has been underresearched. This article analyses a diaspora mapping exercise led by the IOM to demonstrate how an institutional logics perspective can help to better understand how such processes unfold. Taking an organisational perspective, it sheds light on the interplay among international organisations, state agencies, local government, and individual actors in diaspora and development. By focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina, the study offers insights into the challenges and opportunities in diaspora engagement in post‐conflict countries. It underscores the need for further research and the long‐term implications of international organisations' efforts in diaspora development programs and diaspora governance.

This collective discussion brings together six women scholars of and from the post-Yugoslav space, who, using personal experiences, analyze the dynamics of knowledge production in international relations (IR), especially regarding the post-Yugoslav space. Working in Global North academia but with lived experiences in the region we study, our research is often subjected to a particular gaze, seeped in assumptions about “ulterior” motives and expectations about writing and representation. Can those expected to be objects of knowledge ever become epistemic subjects? We argue that the rendering of the post-Yugoslav space as conflict-prone and as Europe's liminal semi-periphery in the discipline of IR cannot be decoupled from the rendering of the region and those seen as related to it as unable to produce knowledge that, in mainstream discussions, is seen as valuable and “objective.” The post-Yugoslav region and those seen as related to it being simultaneously postcolonial, postsocialist, and postwar, and characterized by marginalization, complicity, and privilege in global racialized hierarchies at the same time, can make visible specific forms of multiple colonialities, potentially creating space for anti- and/or decolonial alternatives. We further make the case for embracing a radical reflexivity that is active, collaborative, and rooted in feminist epistemologies and political commitments.

Increasingly, non-state actors exercise unofficial forms of influence within international affairs. Analyzing the actions and platforms in which they operate offers a broader perspective on their influence within diplomatic spheres traditionally occupied by state actors. This paper explores the relationship between victim-oriented advocacy roles taken by the NGO ‘Mothers of Srebrenica’ and the resulting formulation of a ‘culture of remembrance’ as an unofficial part of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s cultural and public diplomacy portfolio. We examine the Mothers’ advocacy work in promoting genocide remembrance and fighting genocide denial within the country’s foreign policy agency framework. We scrutinize under which circumstances their advocacy shapes or is formulated in parallel with official state diplomacy. We trace three types of advocacy engagement and discuss the influence in contributing to the country’s cultural and public diplomacy. This analysis contributes to scholarship on the influence of non-state actors in public diplomacy by examining the role of advocacy organizations on local, regional, and global levels and expanding the scholarship about the intersection of non-state actors and cultural and public diplomacy to include states undergoing transition, particularly post-conflict states.

This paper integrates a different perspective into the diaspora literature, by placing it within the frame of digital diasporas and war time engagement in actions and initiatives traditionally considered as diplomatic. We reconstruct how digital diaspora diplomacy developed during a time when the Internet was relatively new and diplomatic tools were limited due to an ongoing conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We examine BOSNET, an online epistemic community of Bosnian diaspora IT pioneers, with a shared set of normative and principled set of beliefs about the independence of their homeland, and collected, shared and spread information about what was going on in their country. We label their work as ‘policy innovation’ engagement and performativity as 'informal' behaviour, as it was unscripted, uncoded and unregulated by any written conventions or state strategies.

ABSTRACT Transitional justice and diaspora studies are interdisciplinary and expanding fields of study. Finding the right combination of mechanisms to forward transitional justice in post-conflict polities is an ongoing challenge for states and affected populations. Diasporas, as non-state actors with increased agency in homelands, host-lands, and other global locations, engage with their past from a distance, but their actions are little understood. This introductory article to a special issue develops a novel framework to study causal mechanisms and their underlying analytical rationales – emotional, cognitive, symbolic/value-based, strategic, and networks-based – linking diasporas and local actors in transitional justice. Mechanisms featured are: thin sympathetic response and chosen trauma, fear and hope, contact and framing, cooperation and coalition-building, brokerage, patronage, and connective action, among others. The contributors theorize about causal mechanisms and their sequences involving diasporas in multi-sited transitional justice processes and bring empirical evidence from various world regions.