Selecting Groups: Moroccan Chleuhs, Algerian Kabyles and Indian Sikhs in Europe

Abstract

The question of why the propensity to engage in development practices varies from one group to another remains unanswered. The discrepancy is all the more puzzling when one considers groups sharing a roughly similar migration history. This conundrum will serve as a starting point for my investigation of hometown transnationalism. Confronting the beginning and the outcome of the same process for different groups brings about the question of parallelisms and bifurcations. It points to the relevance of engaging in comparative analyses and of studying the migration process as a whole. By this, I refer to the need to adopt a temporal perspective when examining migrants’ behaviours, rather than using history, as is often done, as a mere decorative background. I have chosen to focus on three groups which scholarship has rarely approached together: North African Berbers (Chleuhs and Kabyles) in France and Sikhs in the UK. The chapter presents the rationale for selecting these groups and the methodological options retained to carry out this study. It then provides an overview of this conundrum in order to unravel the theoretical issues guiding this research.