Diaspora Money, Uneven Belonging: Remittance Economies and Development Politics in Conflict-Affected States

This article examines the ways remittance flows and diaspora capital sustain households, reshape local governance, and reproduce distributional inequalities in conflict-affected economies in South Sudan with comparative reference to Somalia and Haiti. It asks how remittance-governed survival economy structures political order during the post-2013 conflict period and its wider transnational history, combining transnationalism and development, the political economy of remittances, and the aid-versus-remittance debate with a research design centred on analysis of household and remittance-survey material, hawala and mobile-money dynamics, interviews with diaspora investors and officials, and comparison with Somalia and Haiti. The central argument is that the issue under study is not best explained as a discrete policy failure or a short-lived crisis. Rather, it is reproduced through linked institutional and political mechanisms that reshape incentives, authority, and access to resources over time (Levitt, 2001; Adams Gammage, 2006). Across the paper, the analysis tracks how these mechanisms operate in practice, what variation they generate, and why reform agendas that ignore the underlying political settlement rarely succeed. The article therefore contributes both a conceptual synthesis and a grounded comparative interpretation of the focal case. Its wider implication is that durable reform requires institutional redesign, political bargaining, and accountability strategies capable of reaching the real sites where power is exercised (Lindley, 2009; Hammond, 2011) (Page World Bank, 2023).