Abstract: This article examines the ideological-political transformation of first-generation Kurdish political refugees from Iranian/Eastern Kurdistan (Rojhelat) with leftist political backgrounds, now residing in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and France. It explores how their ethno-national identity and leftist ideology, situated within the Kurdish diaspora, shape their political orientation in their host countries. The study is based on twenty-six in-depth interviews with current and former members of the offshoots of the Iranian Kurdistan Toilers’ Revolutionary Association ( Komalay Shoreshgeri Zahmatkeshani Kurdistani Eran, or Komala). Findings indicate that exposure to a European political-ideological atmosphere has shifted their stance from authoritarian to libertarian leftism, strengthening the role of Kurdish identity in their political attitude and orientation and fostering a balance between their ethnic and ideological affiliations. Beyond advocating for the Kurdish diaspora, their political engagement in Europe serves as a form of transnational lobbying to influence European countries’ politics regarding Kurdish rights in their country of origin.
This article investigates the dynamic relationship between organizational life and diasporic belonging within Armenian communities in the Carpathian Basin (Transylvania and Budapest) from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century. Challenging essentialist interpretations of ethnic identity, this comparative historical analysis examines the motivations and evolving roles of Armenian organizations as arenas in which belonging and identities were negotiated and transformed. Drawing on archival sources, the study traces the roles of Armenian organizations across three historical periods: the era of confessionalization in the eighteenth century, the age of national and cultural revival in the nineteenth century, and the turbulent decades of the early to mid-twentieth century. The findings show that while early religious organizations fostered communal cohesion and integration through ecclesiastical union with the Roman Catholic Church, later organizations responded to shifting political contexts by accommodating both Hungarian and Armenian national movements. The article argues that Armenian organizational life reflects a strategic, multilayered approach to diasporic belonging, in which individuals and groups simultaneously maintained distinct ethnic and religious identities while actively participating in and contributing to the social, economic, and political spheres of their adopted homelands. Overall, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how diasporic communities construct, negotiate, and perform belonging through collective action and institutional frameworks, highlighting the interplay between ethnic distinctiveness, integration, and the ongoing reimagining of diasporic identity over time.
This article investigates diasporic Armenian belonging as, by default, queer, multiple, and contesting hegemonic accounts that define Armenianness in terms of heteroreproductive and ethnonationalist representational economies. Based on extensive ethnographic research in the United States, the analysis situates Armenian diasporicity within queer diaspora studies, interrogating how collective trauma, racialization, sexual normativity, and migratory trajectories shape experiences of inclusion and exclusion. By centering life histories and affective bonds, the article highlights the dynamic and situational nature of diasporic Armenianness, revealing a multiplicity of homes, affiliations, and relationalities that unsettle fixed notions of origin and belonging. In so doing, it makes an important contribution to a broader understanding of diasporic belonging and calls for embracing the non-monumental queerness of diasporic Armenianness, as it allows us to tap into the queer possibility of forging more livable lives within, across, and beyond Armenian communities.
This article examines how Armenians in Germany negotiate belonging within an internally diverse diaspora under conditions shaped by contrasting state-socialist and liberal-democratic institutional legacies associated with Germany's Cold War division. Drawing on forty-three biographical narrative interviews conducted in Halle (in the former German Democratic Republic) and Cologne (in the former Federal Republic of Germany) between 2017 and 2020, the analysis focuses on everyday practices of internal boundary work through which difference, continuity, and legitimacy are evaluated and negotiated under unequal institutional conditions. Building on Stuart Hall's conceptualization of identity as both being and becoming, the article approaches diasporic identity as a relational and historically situated process rather than a fixed attribute. Focusing on language and religion as key arenas of internal boundary making, the article shows that in East Germany, where Armenian communal life developed late and under conditions of institutional scarcity, linguistic competence and religious commitment acquired heightened symbolic and moral weight. In West Germany, by contrast, dense, church-centered institutions diffused evaluative pressure, normalizing multilingualism and plural modes of religious participation. Across both contexts, particular attention is paid to how respondents articulate distinctions of belonging through evaluative language often framed in terms of the “proper” Armenian. Rather than treating these formulations as stable criteria, the article analyzes such claims as situational, relational, and contested practices of differentiation.
