This book grew out of an international conference that took place at the Erasmus School of Law in Rotterdam in 2013 with the audacious title ‘The Shape of Diversity to Come.’ The conference was conceived as a gathering of scholars from a number of different disciplines to discuss the issue of 21st-century diversity. To us it seemed there were several parallel debates taking place in legal theory, philosophy, sociology, media studies, information science and anthropology on the intersection between new information and communication technologies (ICTs), identity, politics and law. These debates all seemed to focus on different aspects of a set of cognate phenomena, but to proceed in relative isolation. In legal theory there is a keen concern for the methodological nationalism of legal inquiry and a great deal of research on globalization, new ICTs, and their implications for the law, but much of the research is preoccupied with well-known legal troubles – privacy, intellectual property, international governance and regulation – without directly confronting issues of translocal identity and community. In political philosophy there is a lively debate on globalization, migration and the normative questions concerning diversity, but this is rarely linked to the changes brought about by new ICTs and the effects they are having on the cultural landscape. In anthropology and sociology the concept of the ‘diaspora’ has been dusted off and put to new use and there has been a great deal of work on the recent rise of transnational communities – phenomena greatly expedited by new ICTs – but there has been little reflection on the normative legal and political questions these emerging transnational and diaspora communities raise about citizenship and nationality. In sociology there is a keen awareness of the deep structural changes taking place in the nation state and the social worlds it cocreated and hosted, but this work has had relatively little impact on legal and political theory. In media studies, finally, there is keen attention to the way new ICTs are changing the media landscape and reshaping the world, but there is a dearth of studies that connect these insights to the concerns of other disciplines.