Abstract
Abstract Almost all minority ethnic groups in Kazakhstan are immigrants. This means that in addition to their current place of residence, Kazakhstan (their “Second Homeland”), they also have a place of origin (their “Historical Homeland”). The leadership of the country has approached this situation, which offers opportunities as well as dangers, by explicitly exhorting the official ethnic representations of minorities to nurture contacts with their Historical Homelands. In this article the examples of the Chechens and Kurds will be used to show how the representations of both ethnicities actively and politically pursued this task. For both groups, representing a nation without an independent state, a fourth actor must be added to the “triangle nexus” familiar from diaspora studies, respectively Russia and Turkey, whose positions the Kazakhstani government cannot simply disregard. What emerges from the study is the strong emotional link of both minorities’ representatives with Kazakhstan as their Second Homeland.
Highlights
IntroductionThe leadership of the country in the mid-1990s founded the ‘Kazakhstani’ model of civic identity and encouraged the non-Kazakh populace to form ethnocultural organizations, and explicitly called on them to forge and maintain contacts with their Historical Homelands
Almost all minority ethnic groups in Kazakhstan are immigrants. This means that in addition to their current place of residence, Kazakhstan, they have a place of origin
The Kurdistan that the Kurds of Kazakhstan regard as their Historical Homeland today extends across the territories of four states, within each of which Kurds fight to establish their own nation-state, or at least autonomy, which touches on keen sensibilities in Turkey in particular.[4]
Summary
The leadership of the country in the mid-1990s founded the ‘Kazakhstani’ model of civic identity and encouraged the non-Kazakh populace to form ethnocultural organizations, and explicitly called on them to forge and maintain contacts with their Historical Homelands. At first, such contacts were largely unregulated and informal, but it soon became clear that they brought problems. The initial premise of this study is that this unusual situation, which distinguishes Chechens and Kurds from most other ethnicities, has an impact on the political relationship between the ethnicities and the state of Kazakhstan, as well as on their identification of the homeland. The study goes on to establish their relationship with their Historical Homelands and with the Second Homeland in which they live
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