This edited volume explores the multiple effects of remittances. Remittances are money
transfers from migrants to their families, friends and neighbors in their places of origin.
Financially, remittances impress by sheer numbers: Private money transfers amount to almost
four times the budget of official development assistance worldwide. It is therefore no surprise
that remittances have a deep impact on the people, economies, consumption spheres, built
landscapes and infrastructures around the globe.
But: Remittances are much more than money. They comprise objects, ideas, traditions, or
political values, mapping out a cross-border space in which people live, work, and
communicate with multiple belongings. Remittances are sent to individuals, families, or
neighborhoods, and they can be spent individually or collectively, for example in health and
education infrastructures, in businesses and in houses. By doing so, they effect social change
both in places of origin and destination.
However, their power to improve individual living conditions and community infrastructure
mainly results from inequality between the global North and the global South. Therefore, our
edited volume challenges the master narrative of the modernizing, salutary remittance
transfers and reveals dependencies and frictions beyond the migration-development-nexus.
Remittances are thus scrutinized in their effects on both social cohesion and social rupture. By
highlighting the transformative effects of remittances in the context of conflict, climate
change, and the postcolonial, we shed light on the future of transnational society.
We explore remittance relations from a range of disciplines including anthropology,
sociology, history, design, architecture, governance, and peace studies. This transdisciplinary
approach goes hand in hand with a wide range of methodological approaches to research on
remittances, namely ethnography, discourse analysis, archival analysis, comparative studies,
visual field research, narrative analysis, household surveys and statistical analysis. We
furthermore present empirical case studies from a variety of geographical regions, including
Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Turkey, Lebanon, USA, Japan, and various
European countries, as well as historical North America and the Habsburg Empire.