Cosmopolitics in the Syrian Australian Diaspora

This paper, framed by debates around diasporic nationalisms, examines how the war in Syria is reconfiguring political orientations and affiliations within and beyond migrant Syrian-Australian communities. Focusing on activists involved in the Hands Off Syria movement, a response to Western involvement in conflict in the Middle East, it considers the relational and situated nature of these reconfigurations. This paper the entanglement of age, religion, technology and gender in local and global contexts. The paper argues that we can’t simply continue to characterise long-distance politics through humanist and nationalist frames, but rather as a dynamic, cosmopolitical space which entails the negotiation of political positions and the articulation of diverse sites of the political, addressing questions of scale and audience across the local, national and international worlds these activists inhabit.