Migrant transnationalism in violent democracies

What is the relationship between migrant transnationalism and violent democracies, and how does the nature of violent democracies shape the political consequences of migrants’ transnational engagement? Many of the world’s migrant-sending countries, including India, Mexico, the countries of Central America’s Northern Triangle, the Philippines, Pakistan, and South Africa are violent democracies—countries in which the legitimate means to accessing power are no longer violently contested, yet ‘violent pluralism’ persists at the substate level (Arias and Goldstein Citation2010). Violent pluralism involves numerous actors, including political parties, elected officials, and other state authorities; civil society groups and citizens; and, criminal as well as legitimate profit seeking organisations, regularly using violence as a means of competing politically within established democratic institutional frameworks (Arias and Goldstein Citation2010; Auyero Citation2007). Although the violent characteristics of these democracies were once thought to be transitory, some scholars argue that these countries should be conceived of as enduring subtypes of democracies wherein violence is not just the product of faltering democratic institutions or state-society relations, but rather constitutive of them (Arias and Goldstein Citation2010, 243; see also, Levitsky and Murillo Citation2013; Von Holdt Citation2014). This Special Issue puts forth that we can strengthen our understanding of the relationship between transnational migration and origin-country politics by starting with the premise that violence is a key feature of democratic politics in many developing origin-countries.

Drawing principally on the case of Mexico, the volume shows that migrant transnationalism—in particular, the individual and collective financial and social remittances migrants transmit through both informal and institutional channels, can facilitate, encourage, and transform violent pluralism. It also demonstrates that violence conditions the known political effects of migrant remittances in surprising ways. Furthermore, the issue shows that a violent democracy perspective can reveal insights that are overlooked in the extant scholarship on migration and democratisation, migrant and diaspora engagement with origin countries embroiled in various stages of armed conflict, and research on transnational crime.

I proceed by using the Mexican case to develop the concept of violent democracies. Mexico is a quintessential violent democracy and therefore, given the country case’s role in informing our knowledge of how transnational migration affects origin-country politics, forms the focus of most of the articles in this volume. I then show that prior research on the political consequences of transnational migration does not readily help us understand the potential influence of migrant transnationalism in sending countries where violent pluralism is a key feature of democratic politics. Subsequently, I introduce the articles in this volume and highlight how they exemplify the theoretical and empirical gains that can result from the proposed theoretical perspective. Finally, I advance a research agenda for the study of migrant transnationalism and violent democracies.

Mexico: a quintessential violent democracy

Mexico is a quintessential violent democracy and a country whose migration has significantly informed the study of how migrants influence their origin country’s politics. It is therefore ideal for beginning our study. This section uses the Mexican case to develop the concept of violent democracies and to suggest that the analytical category applies to numerous other sending democracies on which the study of migrant transnationalism currently centres.

Violent democracies are governing systems in which competitive elections, civil freedoms, and inclusive participation have taken root, yet the state does not control substate violence. A key feature of these regimes is ‘violent pluralism’ (Arias and Goldstein Citation2010, 20). Numerous institutional actors such as political parties, elected officials and other political authorities regularly use violence strategically in the democratic contest for power; to this end, they may rely on formal, state-sanctioned violent actors or informal and even illicit ones (Auyero Citation2007; Pansters Citation2012, Citation2018; Von Holdt Citation2014). Additionally, (un)civil society groups and citizens use violence to signal their demands to leaders, hold them accountable (Von Holdt Citation2014), and negotiate forcefully (Assies Citation2004). And, criminal as well as legitimate profit-seeking organisations use violence to secure more favourable political environments and electoral outcomes (Holland and Ríos Contreras Citation2017; Trejo and Ley Citation2018).

Cooperation and accommodation between formal state actors and institutions, on the one hand, and informal and illicit nonstate violent actors, particularly at the subnational level, on the other, have long been routine elements of state-making and governance in Mexico (Pansters Citation2012, 3–9). These interactions have persisted since the country’s transition to democracy beginning in the late 1980s; furthermore, violent actors in Mexico have become more plural since then. Today, a myriad of state and non-state actors routinely use violence as an instrument of democratic contestation and participation.

Policy makers and leaders attribute spiralling levels of violence in Mexico to rival drug cartels fighting over transit routes and markets (Guerrero Gutiérrez Citation2016), state efforts to combat drug cartels through approaches such as the kingpin strategy (Chinchilla Citation2018), as well as state collusion with drug trafficking organisations (Pansters Citation2018); however, observers mischaracterise the role of violence in Mexican politics as fundamentally drug-related. Violence certainly escalated after former President Felipe Calderon militarised the ‘War on Drugs’ in 2006. 80,000–100,000 soldiers, police officers, politicians, and civilians were killed, and over 30,000 individuals disappeared between 2006 and 2018 (Mexico Peace Index Citation2018), and 2017 marked the country’s deadliest year in two decades as the homicide rate reached 24 per 100,000 people, or over 29,000 murders in all (Secretaría de Gobernación Citation2018). Still, nearly half of the country’s homicides were not linked to criminal organisations (Clavel Citation2016). The reality is that much of Mexico’s violence has deep socio-political and economic roots and is tied to electoral competition, as well as the pursuit of democratic representation, accountability, and responsiveness.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) historically resorted to limited repression to remain dominant; however, the use of violence evolved into a tactic for winning elections in the late 1980s, when opposition parties became ever more competitive (Schatz Citation2011). Between 1989 and 1994, hundreds of militants working for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) were murdered by police, local politicians associated with the PRI, or gunmen hired by state leaders either in the context of elections or post-electoral conflicts (Eisenstadt Citation2003; Schatz Citation2011). Violence—in the form of coercive occupation of government buildings to protest illegitimate and unfair electoral losses–also became a political instrument of the PRD (Schatz Citation2011, 55).

Violence against local political candidates remains pervasive today. 130 politicians, including 48 candidates for office, were murdered in Mexico between September 2017 and the July 1, 2018 elections (Nugent Citation2018). Many of these murders were ordered by organisations seeking to eliminate politicians who, as part of their electoral platforms, threaten to contain crime (Trejo and Ley Citation2018). This highlights the degree to which the actors using violence to influence elections in Mexico’s new political landscape have become more plural, as well as the complex ways in which non-state criminal organisations and actors carry out violence alongside or in cooperation with legitimate institutional actors.

Mexico’s political incumbents also gain electoral or partisan advantage by using their power and authority to manipulate illegitimate violence in more subtle ways. The former Governor of Oaxaca state, José Murat, regularly hired thugs to create the appearance of civil unrest and ungovernability in municipalities governed by mayors who opposed him, as this permitted him to justify removing those mayors from office and replacing them with loyalists (Giraudy Citation2009). Similarly, former Puebla state Governor, Manuel Bartlett, allegedly ordered state police to ignore, rather than assist, local police efforts to diffuse public unrest in an opposition-ruled municipality, in order to later attack the municipal leaders as incompetent (Giraudy Citation2009). Moreover, research indicating that violence suppresses voter turnout (Ley Citation2018; Trelles and Carreras Citation2012) intimates that incumbents might purposefully turn a blind eye to violence in districts they stand to lose. These examples show how officials with ‘clean hands’ can interact with unwitting nonstate violent actors with significant consequences for democratic competition and outcomes.

Attacks against journalists in Mexico are also best understood from a violent democracy perspective. Mexico is among the most dangerous countries for journalists in the world. This is striking because the country is not at war, and also because there is limited top-down media repression by the central government. A large number of journalist assassinations are linked to the local interests of criminal organisations and their political allies in controlling citizens’ knowledge concerning their leadership and modes of operation, as this information, in turn, can influence local political demand-making and calls for accountability with regard to rule of law (Holland and Ríos Contreras Citation2017). Yet local state authorities and political actors also attack journalists, kidnapping, detaining, and/or torturing them for reasons that include blocking reporting about state and nonstate violence against the National Zapatista Liberation Army, indigenous communities, women, leftist political party activists, and human rights leaders (see e.g. Animal Político Citation2019; Miguel Citation2019; Romero Citation1998). The violent silencing of journalists, and the impunity that follows, is constitutive of how democratic contestation functions ‘on the ground’ in Mexico.

Violent pluralism, by definition, involves grass-roots actors as well. In particular, citizens and (un)civil society organisations use violence to negotiate with political elites and demand greater accountability and better more responsive governance (Von Holdt Citation2014; Assies Citation2004). For example, the Community Front in Defense of Land (Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra, FDPT) initially mobilised non-violently in response to President Vicente Fox’s 2001 announcement that land would be expropriated in various municipalities northeast of Mexico City in order to build a new airport. However, this mobilization turned violent when the government began to forcefully remove residents and business owners in 2006; residents used machetes to keep police from carrying out the lawful evictions, and the FDPT took several police officers hostage (Valero Citation2017). In another case, in 2004, a 300-strong mob lynched two plain-clothed police in San Juan Ixtayopan, a community southeast of the country’s capital city. Reports indicate that residents set fire to the two men after beating them brutally for hours, because they thought they were police imposters seeking to carry out crimes (Rincón Citation2015).

The literature on violent democracies suggests this type of violence is structured by both democratic institutions and the promise of democracy (Von Holdt Citation2014). In the case of the FDPT, the promise of democracy is an opportunity structure that gives citizens the green light to communicate–albeit violently–to leaders that they oppose illegitimate, unrepresentative, and unresponsive government actions (Assies Citation2004). In the case of the lynch mob, it is the failure of democracy to guarantee equal access to justice and security, as expected, that motivates citizens and legitimises their grassroots efforts to express their demands concerning crime and impunity (Phillips Citation2017; Santamaría Citation2017).

Democracy also structures the activities of other, more formal, nonstate armed groups that aim to provide their communities with justice and security, including Mexico’s Community Police (policia comunitaria) and vigilante groups (autodefensas). Community police are highly institutionalised, semi-legal organisations, which build on indigenous governance practices and years of social justice movements and armed resistance against a repressive Mexican state (Sierra Citation2015). They emerged in many of Mexico’s predominantly indigenous communities the late 1990s. Autodefensas are armed vigilante groups that have appeared throughout Mexico in the aftermath of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ for reasons that remain disputed (see Pérez-Armendáriz and Duquette-Rury; Ley, Ibarra-Olivo, and Meseguer Citation2021).

These violent organisations do more than protect communities against organised criminals or state-perpetrated human rights abuses. Their participation in Mexico’s violent pluralism contributes to ongoing processes of defining federal and state, versus local and group rights in the country (Benítez Rivera Citation2015). For example, in 2010, after former president Calderón awarded to foreign firms numerous mining concessions in parts of Guerrero with large indigenous populations, a federation of community police groups led a broad coalition aimed at persuading the federal government to adopt a policy that would be more responsive to local citizens’ interest in protecting the land. Their repertoire of contention included both informal violent action as well as demand-making through formal democratic institutions, such as the courts and various federal agencies (Benítez Rivera Citation2015). In the case of autodefensas, former President Peña Nieto’s legalisation, institutionalisation, and incorporation of some of these groups into the Mexican state (his administration renamed them ‘rural police’) in 2014 (Animal Politico Citation2014), and the fact that key leaders of these groups have subsequently run for, and even taken up, elected offices (Jiménez and Hernández Citation2018; Arrieta Citation2018; Aristegui Noticias Citation2015), suggests that the work of these groups is ultimately another element of a type of political violence that is both structured by and defines Mexico’s competitive democratic landscape.

The Mexican case illustrates both the concept of violent pluralism and the ways in which violent pluralism constitutes democratic contestation, accountability, and demand-making in violent democracies. It is a mistake to claim that the social, criminal, and political violence in Mexico is simply a product of a weak state, faltering political institutions, broken state-society relations, or the escalation of organised crime. Rather, violence serves as an informal instrument of formally democratic political institutions and legitimate institutional actors, as well as citizens and (un)civil society organisations (Arias and Goldstein Citation2010; Helmke and Levitsky Citation2006).

Debates persist as to whether violent democracies are democracies at all, or if they are in fact illiberal or hybrid regimes (Dunning Citation2011). Yet, the plural, decentralised, and substate nature of the violence occurring in violent democracies is clearly distinct from top-down repressive political violence carried out by national leaders in countries such as Russia, Turkey or Venezuela. We concur with Von Holdt (Citation2014) that the ‘democracy’ of violent democracy is not an empty term; but rather, that ‘democracy shapes the forms that violence takes’ while also constraining violence and providing ‘new means in the struggle to curb and hold accountable purveyors of violence’ (p. 148).

The case of Mexico is not isolated among migrant-sending violent democracies. Other cases in the developing world that significantly inform the study of migrant transnationalism include the Philippines, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, India, and Pakistan, among others (see e.g. Daxecker and Jung Citation2018; Iglesias Citation2018; Kleinfeld and Barham Citation2018; Knowlton Citation2017; Córdova Citation2019; Omotola Citation2010). It is therefore surprising that scholars of transnationalism have generally ignored the violent nature of the democracies with which migrants interact.

The violent democracy perspective raises a number of previously unexplored research questions for scholars of migrant transnationalism: 1) How does violent pluralism shape both the formation of transnational migrants and the nature of migrants’ transnational engagement? 2) In what ways and why do transnational migrants directly participate in or purposely induce or diminish violent pluralism? 3) Do transnational migrants indirectly shape the multiple forms of violence occurring in violent democracies and, if so, how? And, 4) How are sending states responding to the ways in which migrants interact with the violence that regularly constitutes their democratic politics? As I show below, extant research does not address these questions.

Migrant transnationalism: democratic deepening versus authoritarian persistence

The transnational perspective on migration proposes that international migrants continue to engage their origin countries culturally, socially, politically, and/or economically even as they become settled in their receiving countries (Levitt and Glick-Schiller Citation2004; Portes Citation1997). Early research on migrant transnationalism suffered an idealist bias, which recent scholarship has begun to correct (see e.g. Krawatzek and Müller-Funk Citation2019). Scholars appeared committed to showing that transnationalism strengthens migrants’ positions vis-à-vis their origin countries’ dominant institutions, norms, cultures, and social structures in ways that enhance justice, representation, equality, freedom, and human and economic development. They posited that transnationalism was part of an emerging anti-hegemonic shift that would fundamentally challenge the power of nations and states (Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton Blanc Citation1994; Smith and Guarnizo Citation1998).

The literature this issue engages most closely—that on transnational migration’s effect on origin-country politics—tends to seek evidence of an association between transnational migration and democratisation or democratic deepening. Family remittances are associated with democratisation and increasing protest in party-based authoritarian regimes (Escribà-Folch, Meseguer, and Wright Citation2015, Citation2018; Maydom Citation2017) and strengthen citizen autonomy from clientelist networks (Díaz-Cayeros, Weingast, and Magaloni Citation2003; Pfütze Citation2012; Tyburski Citation2014). Collective remittances, meaning the resources pooled together by groups of migrants, typically to fund public infrastructure and services for the use of non-migrant and migrant families alike (Goldring Citation2004; Durand, Parrado, and Massey Citation1996), enhance accountability mechanisms (Burgess Citation2016) and increase participation and organisational capacity in sending communities (Duquette-Rury Citation2016, Citation2019; Duquette-Rury and Chen Citation2018; Iskander Citation2010; Østergaard-Nielsen Citation2003). Additionally, migrant participation in their origin countries’ civic life through expatriate elections or as candidates for political office expands inclusivity (Boccagni Citation2011; Smith and Bakker Citation2007). And, social remittances, meaning the skills, knowledge, and values that migrants transmit to nonmigrants who stay in the origin country through phone calls, visits, return migration, and letters (Levitt Citation1998) enhance support for democracy and, to varying degrees, heighten diverse forms of political participation (Barsbai et al. Citation2017; Batista and Vicente Citation2011; Córdova and Hiskey Citation2015; Crow and Pérez-Armendáriz Citation2018; Pérez-Armendáriz and Crow Citation2010; Pérez-Armendáriz Citation2014).

Conversely, scholars have also explored migration’s relationship with authoritarian persistence and the deterioration of democratic governance (Abdih et al. Citation2012). Remittances prolong authoritarian rule (Ahmed Citation2012; Maydom Citation2017), diminish voter turnout (Goodman and Hiskey Citation2008; Germano Citation2013; Citation2018; Ebeke and Yogo Citation2013; Dionne, Inman, and Montinola Citation2014; López García Citation2018), and dampen electoral competition by rewarding incumbents (Bravo Citation2012; Germano Citation2013, Citation2018; Tertytchnaya et al. Citation2018). Entrenched parties use patronage to control and co-opt leaders of migrant organisations who might otherwise have considerable autonomous agency (Brand Citation2010; Goldring Citation2002; Smith Citation2003; Smith Citation2006). Collective remittances serve incumbent party interests at the expense of the citizens the programme targets (Aparicio and Meseguer Citation2012; Simpser, Duquette-Rury, and Ibarra Citation2016). And social remittances can include greater appreciation for authoritarian values and norms (Rother Citation2009; Barsbai et al. Citation2017).

This issue relinquishes the analytical restrictions that have resulted from evaluating political transnationalism from the perspective of a democracy-autocracy binary by focusing instead on how migrants interact with and influence violent democracies, an analytical category in its own right (Arias and Goldstein Citation2010; Holston Citation2008; Levitsky and Murillo Citation2013; O'Donnell Citation1993; Von Holdt Citation2014). It echoes Krawatzek and Müller-Funk’s (Citation2019) call for clearing away the normative bias that drives much of the research on political transnationalism.

Focusing on violent democracies enables us to tackle two additional biases in current research. The first is the tendency for scholars to blame the character of receiving countries’ political institutions and migrants’ experiences abroad when they discover that the effects of migrant transnationalism fall short of their expectations that it enhances democracy or weakens authoritarianism (Barsbai et al. Citation2017; Docquier et al. Citation2016; Rother Citation2009). The political characteristics of receiving countries certainly condition the degree to which migrants engage their origin-country politics in ways that contribute to strengthening democracy (Careja and Emmenegger Citation2012). Yet, as a growing number of scholars show, transnational modes of engagement and their political consequences are shaped not only by receiving country experiences, but also by the characteristics of politics in the sending-country (Ahmadov and Sasse Citation2016; Easton and Montinola Citation2017; Meseguer, Ley, and Ibarra-Olivo Citation2017; Rother Citation2009; Tyburski Citation2014).

A second bias is that when scholars do consider the politics of the origin-country, they not only stress broad categorisations of regime type (e.g. democratic versus authoritarian), but also focus on transnationalism’s influence on formal and well-established informal political institutions and processes (e.g. clientelism and vote buying). While some scholars recognise that sending regimes do not fall squarely under a democracy-authoritarian binary (Rother Citation2009), most nonetheless ignore that transnationalism and its effects may be shaped by novel, contingent, less visible and often violent practices and behaviours that are routine in many migrant-sending countries. It is with this in mind that a violent democracy perspective is particularly valuable.

Transnationalism, civil-conflict, post-conflict reconstruction

Research on diasporaFootnote¹ and migrant engagement in conflict and post-conflict states would seem to provide us with some analytical purchase on the subject of this volume. However, the differing characteristics of these states versus violent democracies point to distinct questions.

States mired in the various stages of armed civil conflict, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, have severe limitations in their ability to protect citizens from armed conflict or provide public goods that include infrastructure, basic education and health care, sanitation, and public security. They lack legitimate state authority, meaning that there is no elite consensus—or, at best, a highly contentious and contingent consensus—on the rules concerning who can access power and wealth and by what means (Hurd Citation1999). Not surprisingly, research on transnationalism involving these settings focuses on whether diasporas contribute to exacerbating or ending violence. It also centres around how these groups contribute to post-conflict state-building, regime installation and legitimacy, transitional justice, and development (Carment and Calleja Citation2018; Kleist Citation2008; Koser Citation2007; Turner Citation2016).

The prevailing view is that diasporas exacerbate violence and undermine peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts. Their remittances help to sustain profit-seeking rebel organisations at all stages of conflict, including during reconstruction (Byman et al. Citation2001; Collier and Hoeffler Citation2004; Kaldor Citation2005), and their influence on the media and through host-country lobbying can undermine efforts to terminate conflicts by (de)legitimising the claims and grievances of a given side internationally (Adamson Citation2005; Fair Citation2005; Horst Citation2007). Moreover, diasporas can influence the politics that drive civil conflicts themselves by reinforcing or aiding in constructing the identities and ideologies that drive some civil conflicts (Fair Citation2005), to the extent that their members continue to harbour persistent grievances after they have been violently displaced (Lyons Citation2007), or insofar as these grievances become essentialised and reified within the receiving country (Collier and Hoeffler Citation2004; Kaldor Citation2005).

These insights are not readily applicable in the context of violent democracies where armed groups do not violently contest the rules concerning access to power and legitimate authority, but rather regular elections generally lead to peaceful transfers of power between competing interests. The resources that émigrés transmit to violent democracies can potentially support profit-seeking armed rebel groups in their origin country. But, it is unlikely that émigrés from violent democracies would support groups with political-based, ideological, or identity-based interests in capturing the state, in part, because such groups are limited in violent democracies. More importantly, émigrés from violent democracies, unlike conflict-diasporas, generally were not displaced by origin country violence fuelled by intergroup ‘political hatreds’ or vehement anti-state sentiments. Remittances that flow to violent democracies may certainly contribute to exacerbating local social, criminal, and political violence, and to strengthening the organisations that perpetrate this violence; but we can expect the mechanisms by which migrants’ financial, material, ideational, or human resources influence this violence and with what political consequences to differ.

Recent research demands that we move ‘beyond notions of conflict-generated diasporas as simply agents of conflict or peace’ (Koinova Citation2018, 1251), that we conceptualise post-conflict states as involved in multi-pronged, contingent processes rather than as heading unidirectionally and rationalistically toward a consolidated and just peace (Carment and Calleja Citation2018; Van Houte Citation2014), and that we explore variation in diasporas’ transnational activities (Østergaard-Nielsen Citation2006). The approach shows that diasporas contribute to conflict emergence, escalation, serious violence, conflict termination, and post-conflict reconstruction (Berkovitch Citation2007). Moreover, it demonstrates that the modes by which diasporas engage in conflict settings are diverse. Some engage with state-building and regime installation and legitimacy by participating in elections and taking positions in newly established government institutions (Østergaard-Nielsen Citation2006); others strengthen transitional justice through human rights advocacy (Brainard and Brinkerhoff Citation2006); and still others contribute to development through philanthropy and investment (Brinkerhoff Citation2008). Notably, these activities can occur even as diaspora remittances undermine efforts to reduce violence.

This issue similarly asks readers to take seriously that migrants are not necessarily agents of democracy or authoritarian persistence. Rather, many participate in imperfect democratic politics that involve significant institutionalised electoral competition and civic rights and freedoms in close interaction with informal, hidden, and illicit violent practices. The many modes by which migrants can participate in this type of political setting, both directly and indirectly, along with the political consequences of their engagement, remain unexplored.

The diaspora and conflict literature has also moved away from generalising about diaspora preferences, interests, and prospects for engagement in armed conflicts toward exploring why some diaspora members mobilise and organise transnationally while others do not (Koinova Citation2011; Um Citation2007). The approach shows that opportunity structures in origin and receiving countries (such as the degree to which a receiving society marginalises migrants, proximity to other members of the diaspora, and programmes to incorporate diasporas in post conflict settings), as well as in transnational spaces that transcend host and sending-societies (such as the internet), influence transnational migrants’ organisation and mobilisation as well as the modes of engagement migrants choose vis-à-vis home country conflicts (Brinkerhoff Citation2006; Koinova Citation2011; Lyons Citation2007; Turner Citation2016; Um Citation2007).

The local, regional, and international contexts that migrants from violent origin democracies implicate tend to differ from those of migrants from origin-countries involved in various stages of armed conflict. While the conditions driving both migrant streams include disparities in economic and human security, policy makers generally consider the outmigration of conflict-diasporas, such as those from Iraq, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Syria, to be an involuntary and reactive response to the immediate threats that major armed conflicts pose for personal security (Richmond Citation1993; Van Hear Citation1998). In contrast, migrants from the violent democracies listed above are considered voluntary or proactive (they can plan for their migration in advance) economic migrants (Richmond Citation1993; Van Hear Citation1998).

The distinction between voluntary and involuntary migration is crude and migrants from many countries fall under both categories. Nevertheless, the national and international legal, regulatory, institutional, and policy regimes that govern ‘voluntary’ versus ‘involuntary’ migrants are not the same and therefore may have distinct effects on migrant mobilisation and organisation. For example, experts have long believed (perhaps wrongly) that migrants who flee armed conflicts are inherently politicised from the time they leave their country, and that the composition of refugee and conflict-driven diasporas tends to reflect the factions that led to conflict in the first place (Brinkerhoff Citation2011). Policy makers therefore consider their participation in origin-country peacebuilding and reconstruction natural, if not essential (Van Houte Citation2014). Indeed, international organisations often establish institutional channels that facilitate this engagement. Implicitly, conflict-diasporas generally enjoy a distinct set of rights, freedoms, resources, and networks on which they can draw to mobilise and organise to pursue their homeland interests (Um Citation2007).

In contrast, ‘voluntary’ migrants are not as protected by international treaties or humanitarian laws. The violence occurring in these democracies is perceived as private and criminal, insofar as it is neither perpetrated by the state or civil or international wars. Because the perpetrators of this violence are plural, migrants from countries such as Mexico, the countries of Northern Triangle of Central America, India, and the Philippines are, by and large, not understood to systematically represent any particular political group or coherent set of grievances. To the extent that the rights and opportunities that ‘involuntary’ migrants from these countries differ in receiving countries from those of conflict-diasporas, the opportunities they have to mobilise around their origin country differ too. As receiving countries develop ever more restrictive and even violent approaches to immigration control, we have an interest in understanding how these settings shape migrants’ interactions with their violent origin democracies.

Furthermore, the violence in violent democracies does not easily lend itself to termination via negotiations, peace settlements, and/or the establishment of new governing regimes. Tackling violent pluralism falls on established domestic state actors who act through existing democratic institutions with input from citizens, and sometimes foreign governments and regional organisations. There exist few, if any, institutional pathways for migrants to become involved. To the contrary, political actors and state authorities in sending-democracies tend to encourage migrant political participation in the formal and legal activities that comprise their democratic politics (Burgess Citation2018; Gamlen Citation2014; Lafleur Citation2013; Paarlberg Citation2019), leaving open the question of under what conditions, how, and to what effect transnational migrants influence the informal and more hidden practices that characterise these governing systems.

The transnationalisation of criminal networks

A final area of pertinent research concerns the relationship between international migration and the transnationalisation of violent nonstate criminal and political organisations. This research shows international migration has enabled such groups to expand globally. Organisations such as Tamil Tigers and the Kurdistan Workers Party, for example, turned to the Tamil and Kurdish diasporas to finance their activities when funding from foreign powers dried up at the end of the Cold War. This strategic decision, in turn, created ideational and identity-based linkages that rendered these and other similar organisations global in scope (Adamson Citation2005). The diffusion of ideas, information, and identities through transnational media outlets and electronic communication also produced this outcome (Adamson Citation2005). Similarly, Central America’s local youth gangs transformed into sophisticated global protection rackets as a result of social remittances (Levitt Citation1998), which included gang-related identities, norms, and symbols, transmitted by migrants in the United States (Cruz Citation2010).

These findings highlight a core question motivating this Special Issue: the potential transnationalisation of violent pluralism. Do migrants, and the social and material resources they make available in the origin country, contribute to shifting the opportunities, incentives, norms, and practices of those who participate in violent pluralism? At the same time, the violent democracy approach challenges the view that states and criminal or nonstate violent actors are oppositional and mutually exclusive. The transnational crime literature sees violent criminal and political organisations as the result of states’ inherently limited capacity to govern (Bergman and Whitehead Citation2009; Ungar Citation2011). Combating violent nonstate transnational violence thus requires stronger states (Adamson Citation2005; Felbab-Brown Citation2010). Foregrounding the fact that the state and nonstate violent actors are mutually accommodating, if not constitutive, in violent democracies can significantly strengthen research on transnational crime and its linkages to migration.

Transnationalism and violent democracies: a first cut

This volume explores how transnational migration affects politics in violent democracies, as well as how the violence occurring in these democracies mediates the known impact of migrant transnationalism on origin country political outcomes. Drawing mostly on evidence from the Mexican case, the articles consider the role of family and collective remittances. Taken together, they suggest that family and collective remittances contribute to the persistence and expansion of violent pluralism, as they appear to incentivise the use of violence by formal political actors and enable the formation of new forms of informal violent groups. The articles also highlight the futility of assessing whether these interactions are in the service of democratisation or authoritarian persistence. Rather, given the decentralisation, plurality and pervasiveness of violence, we must settle on the possibility that migrant remittances might reinforce violence as a (legitimate) corrective to violence and persistent injustice in the context of democratic governance, including its procedural aspects and its promise.

In ‘Remittances, Criminal Violence and Voter Turnout,’ López García and Maydom (Citation2021) examine how violence conditions the impact of family remittances on voter turnout. Whereas there is a general consensus that remittances depress voter turnout, the authors find that remittance recipients are more likely to vote in contexts of endemic violence in Mexico and across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. These findings speak directly to the question of how violent pluralism can mitigate what has hitherto been understood as a negative relationship between migrant transnationalism and democratic deepening in origin countries.

Looking at their findings through a democracy-authoritarianism lens, it would appear that remittances can strengthen electoral accountability in violent democracies. In contrast, the violent democracy perspective compels us to consider whether their findings imply that remittance recipients treat voting as a formality–a practice by which they pay lip service to democratic procedures, all the while legitimising violence. In settings where violence underpins electoral competition and outcomes, such as those that prevail in the countries from which the authors draw their evidence, the ways in which remittances interact with the meaning of voting, motivations to vote, as well as vote choice thus merit further inquiry.

Focusing on the case of Mexico, Doyle and López García (Citation2021) show that it would be a mistake to interpret the preceding results as a signal that remittances encourage recipients to demand accountability in violent democracies. In their article, ‘Crime, Remittances, and Presidential Approval in Mexico,’ they show that members of remittance-receiving households in Mexico are less likely to punish incumbents for the violence that surrounds them. Concretely, as remittances rise, pressures on national governments to implement policies that reduce violence levels decline. This finding seems counterintuitive at first blush, but it makes sense in the context of violent pluralism. The reason is that migrant remittances enable recipients to treat security as a private good–one to which only the more privileged have access; at the same time, remittances make recipients more likely to go the polls. In communities with high numbers of remittance recipients, incumbents are thus unlikely to be punished for the occurrence of violence, even as they use or permit violence for electoral or partisan advantage.

Another two articles explore the relationship between family and collective remittances and the formation of nonstate armed vigilante groups (autodefensas) in Mexico. In ‘The 3 × 1 Program for Migrants and Vigilante Groups in Contemporary Mexico,’ Pérez-Armendáriz and Duquette-Rury (Citation2021) demonstrate that vigilante organisations are more likely to emerge in municipalities that regularly participate in the 3 × 1 Program for Migrants, a federal social spending programme in which local, state, and federal levels of government match the collective remittances that migrant hometown associations (HTAs) send back to their communities of origin. Notably, they claim that it is not migrant monies per se, but rather the repeated practice of migrants and origin community leaders and citizens working collectively to plan, finance, and implement public goods projects that facilitates the organisation of these armed groups.

This finding is particularly interesting given that the 3 × 1 Program has been hailed as a model of development and inclusive governance (Iskander Citation2010). It is lauded because collaboration involving HTAs and other migrants, non-migrants living in sending communities, as well as state authorities contribute to heightening social capital, creative governance, and civic engagement in origin communities (Duquette-Rury Citation2016; Burgess Citation2016; Iskander Citation2010). Pérez-Armendáriz and Duquette-Rury’s findings that this collaboration is associated with a rise in armed vigilante groups suggest that migrants can shift their transnational experiences to respond to and participate in the violent, informal and even illicit practices that characterise violent democracies–practices that do not unequivocally strengthen either democracy or authoritarianism.

The authors briefly note the role in leading the vigilante groups played by return migrants who had lived for years in the United States. This puzzling observation must be investigated further, along with broader questions of social and political remittances. We have an interest in understanding the personal motivations of these leaders. Perhaps more importantly, we need to learn whether and how the social and political violence occurring United States, including through ever more violent immigration policy regimes, contributes to mobilising and structuring return migrant involvement in these organisations and to informing the social and political remittances that migrants transmit to Mexico from abroad more generally.

‘Vigilantism and Family Remittances in Mexico,’ by Ley, Ibarra-Olivo, and Meseguer (Citation2021) also examines the relationship between remittances and autodefensas. However, unlike Pérez-Armendáriz and Duquette-Rury, the authors focus on the role of family, as opposed to collective, remittances. Meseguer, Ley and Ibarra-Olivo find that vigilante groups are less likely to exist in Mexican municipalities with high shares of remittance-receiving households, and more likely to exist where the share of receiving households is lower.

Their finding is incongruous with research showing that family remittances provide recipients with resources for engaging in contentious action and privatising public goods. At first blush, it also appears to contradict Pérez-Arméndariz and Duquette-Rury (Citation2021). In fact, the negative relationship between family remittances and vigilante groups reinforces the latter’s argument that something other than migrant monies facilitates vigilante group formation. In this case, the fact that we observe more vigilante groups in communities that receive fewer remittances is consistent with research suggesting that vigilante groups are most likely to emerge in locales with unequal access to state security and justice. It is precisely these more unequal remittance-receiving communities that must turn to something other than buying private security or making demands on leaders through formal electoral mechanisms in order to obtain security, justice and government responsiveness.

These articles begin to address the questions this Special Issue advances. They highlight precisely the type of theoretical and empirical breakthrough that a violent democracy perspective brings to research on how transnationalism affects politics in migrant-sending countries. The contributions bring nuances to our knowledge of how migrant remittances influence the formal political behaviour of members of migrant-sending households in violent democracies. They also show that varying forms of migrant remittances, ortheir relative absence, can contribute to the proliferation of violence occurring in Mexico. Overall, they spotlight how migrant transnationalism interacts with violence in ways that affect democratic competition and outcomes as well as citizens’ capacity to demand political accountability and government responsiveness.

Our hope is that the articles will motivate further research both within Mexico and in global comparative perspective. In the Mexican case, we need to explore further how remittances shape, and how violence conditions the influence of remittances, on a more diversified set of political behaviours, including the participation of migrants in extra-territorial elections, as well involvement by all Mexican citizens in non-electoral (including violent and illicit) forms of political participation. We also have an interest in exploring both a greater variety of political outcomes and other channels by which migrants influence Mexico’s violent politics, particularly social and political remittances (see e.g. Krawatzek and Müller-Funk Citation2019), and return migration. Because of the complex and often hidden nature of violent politics, there is also a need for mixed methods and multidisciplinary research. That is, to fully tackle the questions this Issue raises, we must complement research that identifies general associational or causal relationships with studies that explore the processes by which transnational migrants (and nonmigrants) interact with political violence up close and on the ground.

Toward a research agenda on transnationalism in violent democracies

Looking beyond the case of Mexico and the questions the articles this Issue examines, I summarise four broad areas for future inquiry below.