Many scholars view diaspora from the perspective of migration. Dwayne Williams sees a symbiotic relationship between diaspora and migration. “Social processes such as migration (whether forced, induced or voluntary) do not simply divide people of African descent, but can and do serve as a unifying force.” Stephen Vertovec joined Robin Cohen as they both struggled to define the parameters of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism, ultimately stating that sometimes each topic is incorporated into the other. They distinguish between new global migration flows as a recent phenomenon, inextricably linked to economic pushes/pulls from places of entry and exit.

For Vertovec and Cohen, the diaspora framework explains the multilocality of social and cultural identity formations. The concept of transnationalism provides a framework for understanding how global identities are formed. They caution against applying the term diaspora to communities that were deterritorialized or can be described as transnational. They understand diaspora formation as linked to migration flows. However, nowhere in their six-hundred-page volume can one find a clearly delineated definition of the three concepts. The theorizing of each of these topics of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism is still being developed: “That these three themes are intuitively related is undeniable, but nowhere in their six-hundred-page volume can one find a clearly delineated definition of the three concepts.

African diaspora theory is organic; it evolves, applies, and changes as different scholars take up the study of black people around the world in different eras. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza notes the difficulty in defining the African diaspora (preferring to use the term with a lowercase letter). He writes: “there are several conceptual difficulties in defining the African diaspora; as it simultaneously refers to a process, a condition, a space and a discourse”.

Avtar Brah succinctly presented the tension in using diaspora as an explanatory paradigm. In her monograph Cartographies of the Diaspora, she describes how the use of “diaspora” can be too general: “Its explanatory power [lies] in addressing specific problems associated with transnational movements of people, capital, goods, and cultural iconographies.” Kim D. Butler recognizes these difficulties, but suggests “how” to use the African diaspora framework when studying transnational and contemporary diasporic communities. Butler advocates that scholars use a checklist based on previous theorists’ models and then adapt the checklist to reflect the unique characteristics of people in the diaspora within the study group. Butler identifies some of the problems when scholars have tried to define diaspora by observing the characteristics of individual diasporas and [then] using them as a checklist.”