What is a community? What does it mean to be a part of a community, especially when that community is not in its homeland? These are the main questions that I have been investigating during my research of the Meskhetian Turks and their experiences in Central Asia. In my first post I provided a short […]
Georgia
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 […]
Making Sense of Meskhetian Turk Migrations
You can’t undo a deportation. Jonathan Shapiro For my last three blog posts, I have decided to look at the history of Meskhetian Turks from their deportation in 1944 to the modern day. In this blog post, I am going to do my best to familiarize the reader with the Meskhetian Turks and how forced […]
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 […]