CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Asya Asya Budagyan |
|---|---|
| Title | Memory of the Armenian Genocide: Prejudice Formation Among Young Members of the Armenian Diaspora |
| Summary | National identity finds its bases not only inside the community one belongs to, it also refers to the outgroup members and requires comparison with them. To put it differently, national identity does not only tell “who we are”, but it also tells “who we are not”. In some cases, the differences with other groups are perceived as interesting things to explore, in others, only the similarities are highlighted, and sometimes, these differences are used as a basis for prejudice, hatred, and even violence towards other groups. Scholars suggest that Armenian national identity has relied on the sense of victimhood and evil images of Turkish people for decades. This perception is stemming from the Armenian Genocide that happened in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and multiple waves of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, in which Turkey supports Azerbaijan against Armenia. Thus, prejudices toward Turkey and Turks are intertwined in the discourse of Armenian presidents and the attitudes of ordinary people who still experience collective trauma many generations later. Although a lot of scholars explore prejudice, only a few of them pay attention to how the memory of traumatic events in a distant past is still retained in everyday practices in the form of prejudice. Moreover, they mostly study prejudice among dominant social groups against minorities. This paper shows that prejudice towards Turkish people plays an important role in the national identity building of the Armenian diaspora in Russia and the USA for decades. Thus, the thematic analysis of the 12 interviews shows three main mechanisms that (re)produce prejudice and sustain it across generations: (1) the country and regional context, (2) family context, and (3) individual political views and political context. |
| Supervisor | Bauböck, Rainer |
| Department | Nationalism Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/budagyan_asya.pdf |
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