Endorsers, challengers or builders? Political parties’ diaspora outreach in a postconflict state

How do parties in government and opposition in a contested postconflict state reach out to their diasporas abroad? Do their policies overlap or differ, and if so why? Scholarly accounts on sending states’ outreach towards diasporas have paid little attention to the varieties of actors and processes within sending states, and have grouped states with contested sovereignty, with weak control over domestic institutions and over contested international borders, in the same cluster as states for which sovereignty is not a salient issue. This article focuses on transnational party engagement of diasporas abroad within one of these contested states, Kosovo. I conceptualize three types of extraterritorial party outreach—state-endorsing, state-challenging, and party-building— pursued actively or passively. I also develop a typological theory showing causal pathways by which types of diaspora engagement approaches emerged in postindependence Kosovo. I argue that parties that emerge from political movements with credentials from engagement with secessionism and warfare behave like parties in fully sovereign states. They are more likely to seek the diaspora through a state-endorsing or party-building approach, depending on whether they are in government or opposition. Parties that are newly institutionalized in the postconflict polity seek to engage the diaspora through an active state-endorsing or state-challenging approach