Following the sudden, unpredicted collapse of the Soviet Union and consequently the end of the cold-war era, politicians and academics began to focus on what they regarded as the most significant structural and behavioral issues pertaining to the new global politics. Within that context, neo-realists, neo-liberals, and neo-culturalists were considering subjects such as the contemporaneous disarray in the international system and its impact on patterns of foreign relations, the “clash of civilizations,” the implications of the purported global hegemony of the United States, the chances of further major and “small” wars, nuclear proliferation, democratization and peace, multilateralism versus bilateralism, the roles of international institutions, the international political economy, and other such matters. Focusing on those concerns, politicians and analysts, especially in the United States, were paying little attention to some equally important matters, such as the reemergence of ethnicity as a central issue in domestic and international politics. More specifically, they did not attach sufficient importance to the ongoing establishment of new ethno-national diasporas, the reawakening of dormant ones, the regrouping of established diasporas and the processes of their development and their unmaking, and the impacts of all those processes on global, regional, and domestic politics.

Such neglect not only has been characteristic of academic deliberations in the sphere of international relations, which have focused on the aforementioned list of developments, but also has been typical of scholars in the field of ethnic studies in general and in the specialty of ethno-national diasporas in particular.