Books by Vahe Sahakyan
Published by Yerevan State University Press, 2022
Անթոլոգիայում ընդգրկված են սփյուռքների տեսական ու համեմատական ուսումնասիրությունների միջգիտակարգա... more Անթոլոգիայում ընդգրկված են սփյուռքների տեսական ու համեմատական ուսումնասիրությունների միջգիտակարգային ոլորտում նշանակալի անգլիալեզու հոդվածների, ինչպես նաև մենագրությունների որոշ հատվածների թարգմանություններ։ «Սփյուռք» հասկացության ըմբռնումների շուրջ բազմազան ու երբեմն հակընդդեմ մոտեցումների ներկայացմամբ անթոլոգիայի նպատակն է խթանել ու խրախուսել քննական մոտեցումները հայկական սփյուռքի ուսումնասիրություններում։
Գիրքը նախատեսված է դասախոսների, բարձր կուրսերի ուսանողների, ասպիրանտների, հայցորդների և առհասարակ սփյուռքով հետաքրքրվող մասնագետների համար։
Papers by Vahe Sahakyan
The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century, (ed. by Talar Chahinian, Sossie Kasbarian, Tsolin Nalbantian), I.B. Tauris, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023
Scholarship on diasporic governmentality has primarily addressed the subject from the perspective... more Scholarship on diasporic governmentality has primarily addressed the subject from the perspective of a sending state or a diasporic institution, to explain the particular ways, strategies, calculations, and tactics enabling the projection of governmental power over the dispersed populations. This chapter explores the transnational governmental efforts of the exiled leaders of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Bolshevik government of Soviet Armenia in the period between the 1920s and 1930s to propose an approach to diasporic governmentality which is multi-centered, multi-agency—both state- and diaspora-based. It argues that the governmental strategies of these Armenian leaders and institutions involved three parallel processes: a) discursive construction of Armenian collective needs, b) creation of spaces of socialization, in which dispersed Armenian populations and their diaspora-born descendants would be exposed to these discourses on a regular basis, and c) expansion of their governmental efforts over the organized and established Armenian spaces in the diaspora. In addition, the ARF leaders also employed social discipline and exclusion to deal with dissenting voices and to consolidate the party’s ranks around the anti-Soviet discourse. The transnational activities of various state and non-state actors, as the chapter suggests, may end up fractioning diasporic spaces locally, nationally and transnationally, rather than integrating dispersed populations into a singular governable and governmental space.
EVN Report Magazine, 6 (Spyurk/Diaspora), 2021
The article foregrounds the complexities of diasporas, and the Armenian diaspora in particular, b... more The article foregrounds the complexities of diasporas, and the Armenian diaspora in particular, by briefly examining three conspicuous approaches to diaspora conceptualizations in theoretical and comparative studies of diasporas and the empirical realities of the Armenian diaspora. It is suggested as a conclusion to account both the discrepancies within theoretical and comparative studies of diasporas which complicate the conventional thinking and approaches to diaspora, and also the tensions between homeland-centrism/diaspora-centrism, ethnic/transethnic, Armenian speaking/non-Armenian speaking, religious/secular (and other) which exist within and across segments of the Armenian diaspora.
Armenia 2018: Realities and Perspectives, Editors Ashot Voskanyan, Thomas Schrapel (Yerevan: Armenian Research Center in Humanities), 2020
In many academic publications, diaspora is often associated with dispersed communities, sharing t... more In many academic publications, diaspora is often associated with dispersed communities, sharing the same ethnic origin, living in different countries and maintaining
connections with their real or imaginary homeland.This chapter questions whether ethnicity provides an adequate analytical lens for conceptualizing diasporas, and also examines the boundaries and relations between the concepts of diaspora, ethnicity and transnation. Based on qualitative interviews conducted among members of the Armenian diaspora in the U.S. and France, it argues that the hybrid realities and diversities encompassing the lived experiences of diaspora Armenians are better and more objectively accounted for when diaspora is analyzed as a transethnic, translinguistic and transcultural phenomenon. Conceptualized in such a way, diaspora is much broader category than both ethnicity and 'translation' — another term which is often used in migration studies to denote the transnational connectedness of nations beyond the boundaries of nation-states.
K. Babayan, M. Pifer (eds.) An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Problematizing diaspora/homeland and diaspora/host-country binaries, this chapter argues that the... more Problematizing diaspora/homeland and diaspora/host-country binaries, this chapter argues that the descendants of once dispersed populations and the institutions they establish in various countries become embedded in the social fabric of local societies, and therefore they can no longer be considered as temporary in “host” countries with an inalienable and essentialized yearning for the homeland. By focusing on the formation of Armenian public and private spaces of difference in Lebanon and France in the twentieth century it is suggested that even polities that promoted and valorized assimilation have yielded spaces for the articulation, expression and production of ethno-confessional differences. In the process of negotiating such enthno-confessional spaces of difference, various Armenian ethnic institutions emerged in these countries, some of which became (permanently) embedded in the legal, political, and social structure of local societies. It is around and beyond the network of these emerging and declining, enduring and short-term, local and translocal ethnic structures and institutions that different Armenian spaces have developed in Lebanon and France (and elsewhere), in relation to which subsequent generations of (originally) displaced Armenians articulated their own forms of cultural and ethnic difference, negotiated various expressions of Armenianness.
EVN Report, 2018
This essay complicates dominant discourse(s) on Armenian diaspora by exploring the concepts of 'e... more This essay complicates dominant discourse(s) on Armenian diaspora by exploring the concepts of 'ethnic' and 'diasporic' leadership in theoretical and comparative perspectives.
Հայ սոցիոլոգիական մտքի անթոլոգիա, Երևան, ԵՊՀ Հրատարակչություն, 2018
Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, 2006
Interviews by Vahe Sahakyan
Talks by Vahe Sahakyan
Compatriotic societies were once ubiquitous organizations throughout the Armenian diaspora. They ... more Compatriotic societies were once ubiquitous organizations throughout the Armenian diaspora. They significantly contributed to the resettlement of Armenian genocide survivors and refugees in Soviet Armenia and the Middle East. Many compatriotic societies, however, were founded decades before the genocide in the United States through the efforts of early Armenian immigrants from the Ottoman Empire. Their initial aim was to support various projects in native villages and towns, in their respective homelands. The genocide, the deportations of Armenians as well as the destruction of their villages and towns during WWI prompted these organizations to rethink their programs and adjust their activities accordingly. This lecture will address the role of the compatriotic societies in modern Armenian diasporic communities by exploring their translocal activism and the changes in their programmatic endeavors as they responded to events which affected their compatriots in their homeland and elsewhere in the diaspora.
PhD dissertation by Vahe Sahakyan
My dissertation explores the conditions and actions that led to the transformation of a post-geno... more My dissertation explores the conditions and actions that led to the transformation of a post-genocide Armenian dispersion into a transnational diaspora. Over time, banishment and mistreatment had forced large numbers of Armenians to abandon their ancestral homes in the Ottoman Empire. The most decisive manifestation of such displacement was the deportations and wholesale massacres during WWI, retrospectively defined as genocide, which resulted in large concentrations of survivors in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. Using histories of Armenian communities and institutions, the Armenian language periodical press, and the information acquired through in-depth interviews with notable diaspora Armenians in Lebanon, France and the United States, I analyze the formative impact that changing international and host-country specific socio-political conditions have had on the ways in which Armenian elites and institutions defined and redefined their attitudes towards Soviet Armenia; how competing discourses on conceptions of the Armenian homeland, diasporic identities and incompatible ideologies and orientations towards Soviet Armenia clashed and led at once to the emergence of different forms of Armenian identity and to a transnational schism in the Armenian diaspora. I suggests that while genocide recognition after the fiftieth anniversary of the Armenian genocide in 1965 introduced a shared ground between the formerly hostile Armenian camps, by the mid-1980s, the prevailing institutional divisions produced homeland-centered and diaspora-centered paradigms of diasporic belongings. Throughout, my research considers the ways in which institutions and leaders aspired to forge and project transnationally coherent, aspirational Armenian identities, to which they worked to rally their constituencies, and juxtaposes these efforts to the actual subjectivity and fluidity of Armenian diasporic identities and self-images of subsequent generations, shaped under different host-country contexts. My study draws on theoretical and methodological principles developed in diaspora studies, transnationalism and globalization. It contributes to social constructivist perspective in diaspora studies by stressing the role of elites and institutions in the formation of the post-genocide Armenian diaspora and diasporic identities, and equally emphasizing the influences of changing international and host-country conditions and the policies of a state, projecting itself as the homeland.
History of Art Conferences by Vahe Sahakyan
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Books by Vahe Sahakyan
Գիրքը նախատեսված է դասախոսների, բարձր կուրսերի ուսանողների, ասպիրանտների, հայցորդների և առհասարակ սփյուռքով հետաքրքրվող մասնագետների համար։
Papers by Vahe Sahakyan
connections with their real or imaginary homeland.This chapter questions whether ethnicity provides an adequate analytical lens for conceptualizing diasporas, and also examines the boundaries and relations between the concepts of diaspora, ethnicity and transnation. Based on qualitative interviews conducted among members of the Armenian diaspora in the U.S. and France, it argues that the hybrid realities and diversities encompassing the lived experiences of diaspora Armenians are better and more objectively accounted for when diaspora is analyzed as a transethnic, translinguistic and transcultural phenomenon. Conceptualized in such a way, diaspora is much broader category than both ethnicity and 'translation' — another term which is often used in migration studies to denote the transnational connectedness of nations beyond the boundaries of nation-states.
Interviews by Vahe Sahakyan
Russian translation https://old.hayernaysor.am/ru/archives/189175
Talks by Vahe Sahakyan
PhD dissertation by Vahe Sahakyan
History of Art Conferences by Vahe Sahakyan
Գիրքը նախատեսված է դասախոսների, բարձր կուրսերի ուսանողների, ասպիրանտների, հայցորդների և առհասարակ սփյուռքով հետաքրքրվող մասնագետների համար։
connections with their real or imaginary homeland.This chapter questions whether ethnicity provides an adequate analytical lens for conceptualizing diasporas, and also examines the boundaries and relations between the concepts of diaspora, ethnicity and transnation. Based on qualitative interviews conducted among members of the Armenian diaspora in the U.S. and France, it argues that the hybrid realities and diversities encompassing the lived experiences of diaspora Armenians are better and more objectively accounted for when diaspora is analyzed as a transethnic, translinguistic and transcultural phenomenon. Conceptualized in such a way, diaspora is much broader category than both ethnicity and 'translation' — another term which is often used in migration studies to denote the transnational connectedness of nations beyond the boundaries of nation-states.
Russian translation https://old.hayernaysor.am/ru/archives/189175