Search

This paper analyses the 'nationalist movement' of Ahıska, a forcibly displaced people who have been arriving in Turkey from various parts of the former Soviet Union since the early 1990s. I focus on how members of this community attempt to define the Turkish nation, how they invoke migration to Turkey as a patriotic and nationalist act, how they criticize the state's responses to this migration as insufficiently nationalist, and how they respond to the movement of non‐Turkish others into the territorial and documentary space that they seek to inhabit. This nationalist movement, albeit small in number, demands our attention because it is born of a phenomenon that is intimately familiar to displaced people and not commonly associated with nationalism – the longing for rest. This longing animates Ahıska efforts to organize themselves and engage with the Turkish state. What possibilities and limitations does this genre of nationalist movement hold for displaced people across the world? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the foundation years of the Republic, nationalism was an ideology that the state used to form a national society, and it showed its influence in many areas, from politics to economically, social, cultural, and shaped state policies. On the other hand, religion remained in the background, due to its connotation of the Ottoman state and for the purpose of creating modern society. After the Second World War, the Cold War process, which was founded on the basis of economic and ideological struggle, began and the world was divided into two poles. In this struggle led by the US and the USSR, almost the whole world has been affected in every field. Turkey is among the countries directly affected by the Cold War period. In particular, the Soviet fear, that is anti-communism, gave direction to Turkey's political, economic and even socio-cultural policy. This effect has shown itself in the field of nationalism and religion in Turkey, the state has taken a completely different situation from before the Cold War. In our study; In the early years of the Cold War, the first five years after the end of Second World War, how the shape of the anti-communist influence the ideology of nationalism and religious in Turkey and these two cases were discussed as how to reproduce the regulation of relations based on this effect. In the early years of the republic, religion and nationalism, which did not stand close to each other, were allied with the influence of anti-communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]