ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses several examples by making three interrelated points to emphasize that there is a form of political obligation that is pertinent to the political geography and experiences of diasporic people. First, the way in which the state insists that its citizens are loyal to it is reflected in the disturbingly narrow way that political theory has conceptualized what counts as a political obligation. Second, the idea of a diaspora involves a political understanding about identity that cannot be reduced to the idea of a citizen having to be politically obliged. Third, there is a liminal political space that does not fit into the ostensibly contiguous delimited spatiality of the territorial nation-state. The idea of a diaspora's political obligation is not about sovereignty, the law, or the authority of the state, but about the phenomenology of conforming as members of a diasporic community.
