Like the Circassians and other groups I wrote about in a previous blog post, the Russian campaigns in the Caucasus in the 1800s resulted in over half of the Abkhaz population leaving their historical homeland on the northwest shore of the Black Sea for Turkey, in what Abkhaz historian Stanislav Lakoba called an “ethnic catastrophe” […]
Author: Katharine Khamhaengwong
Identity in Exile: The Expansion of the Circassian Nation?
Identity in Exile: The Expansion of the Circassian Nation Prior to the expulsion of the Circassians, or Adyge, from their homeland in the North Caucasus in 1864, the 1 to 1.7 million Circassians lived as 12 distinct tribes along the northeastern shore of the Black Sea (Richmond 2). They did not have a strong or […]
Great Retreat: Muslim Migration from the Russian Empire to Turkey
When people think about ethnic minority groups in Turkey, they usually think about the obvious cases—Kurds and Syrians today, Armenians and Greeks in the past. However, the country’s population of 83.4 million encompasses many other smaller groups, including significant groups that came from the Russian Empire during its expansion (World Bank). If one wanted to […]
The Turkish-Georgian Migration Exchange
One area of migration that I kept coming back to in our discussions of migration theory was the bidirectional labor migration I encountered while living near the Georgian-Turkish border. So many of the theories of migration (like the push-pull model, neoclassical migration theory, human capital theory, etc.) seemed to easily explain migration between high-developed, wealthy […]
Turkish Migration to Germany & the Netherlands
I read Rinus Penninx’s A Critical Review of Theory and Practice: The Case of Turkey with interest, as I have heard quite a lot about Turkish migration to Germany and the Netherlands in recent years, but knew very little about its origins. I am particularly interested in the social and political aspects of migration, but […]