This article examines how diaspora actors reassemble citizenship under conditions of hybrid authoritarianism through digital communication. Drawing on a collective case study of Ethiopian Somali diaspora networks – the Somali Region Alliance for Justice (SRAJ) and the Congress for Somali Cause (CSC) – it analyses how platform-specific communicative practices shape political mobilisation. Based on multi-sited fieldwork, digital ethnography, and document analysis, the study shows that digital counter-publics emerge not from platform affordances alone, but through masspersonal communication that enables citizenship claims to circulate within relational, identity-based networks. These communicative practices turn transported conflicts into negotiated frameworks for contesting belonging, boundaries, and political authority. The findings advance scholarship on diaspora citizenship, communication, and hybrid political orders by theorising citizenship as a relational, performative, and digitally mediated communicative practice.
Sinclair et al. (Thu,) studied this question.