This article argues that Pakistani diasporic identity is not simply inherited, retained, or lost through migration, but continuously negotiated through strategic forms of dialogue across familial, communal, institutional, and digital spaces. While existing scholarship often frames intergenerational tensions through binaries of tradition and modernity, assimilation and cultural retention, this article contends that the central issue is not identity conflict per se, but dialogic strain: the uneven and ongoing negotiation of belonging, legitimacy, and cultural authenticity between generations within diasporic contexts. To theorise this process, the article draws on feminist peacebuilding and Goffmanian dramaturgy to conceptualise diasporic identity as relational, performative, and contextually mediated. Feminist peacebuilding foregrounds the significance of care, relationality, and gendered modes of negotiation in sustaining intergenerational cohesion beyond conventional conflict paradigms. Simultaneously, Goffman’s dramaturgical framework illuminates how diasporic subjects strategically perform and recalibrate identities across multiple social ‘stages’, including the home, community networks, educational institutions, and digital environments.
The article further argues that digital technologies intensify these negotiations by collapsing generational and spatial boundaries, producing new forms of visibility, surveillance, contestation, and self-fashioning. Online spaces become critical sites through which competing understandings of authenticity, religiosity, gender, and national belonging are articulated and contested. Rather than positioning younger generations as resisting inherited traditions, the article demonstrates how both older and younger diasporic actors engage in continuous processes of negotiation aimed at preserving continuity while adapting to shifting social realities. By advancing the concept of dialogic strain, this article contributes to broader debates on diaspora, identity formation, and postcolonial belonging. It reconceptualises diaspora not as a fixed cultural condition, but as an ongoing process of mediated negotiation in which identity is continually produced through interaction, performance, and intergenerational dialogue.
By examining dialogic strain within Pakistani diasporic family and digital contexts, this article contributes to the Journal of Dialogue Studies special issue by demonstrating how dialogue operates through everyday negotiations of legitimacy, visibility, and relational belonging rather than solely through formal or institutional communication.