Forging a Postcolonial Sovereign State with Diasporic Peoples

Abstract

European colonizing powers in carving out land mass for their colonies were unconcerned with the indigenous peoples who were bounded within the arbitrary colonized territories. Additionally, massive waves of migrants were brought in to fill the economic needs of developing the colonies. Consequently, all postcolonial societies are multi-indigenous peoples and multi-diasporic societies. This is a condition that poses obstacles to the forging of a sovereign people for the postcolonial nation. The fate of the diasporic peoples in the new postcolonial nation is highly dependent on several factors: namely, the size of the diasporic communities, the depth of their embeddedness in the domestic economy and to a very significant extent, the willingness of the indigenous government to recognize the diasporic peoples as citizens of the new nation. This paper examines the four paradigmatic possible fates of the diasporic peoples under different conditions in postcolonial Asia.