The following is the transcript of a lecture delivered by Prof. Khachig Tölölyan on May 21, 2025 for the Hamazkayin New York chapter, titled “The Armenian Diaspora: Today, and Perhaps Tomorrow.”
I will not be giving an academic, scholarly lecture. But what I will say has been influenced by reading the work of and talking with a number of colleagues who are deeply knowledgeable about Armenian diasporic life. Since there can be no footnotes acknowledging their contributions, I am simply going to list their names, randomly. They are: Sossie Kasbarian and Talar Chahinian, co-editors of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies; Hratch Tchilingirian; Vahe Sahakian; Razmik Panossian; Jirair Libaridian; Hagop Gulludjian; Khachig Der Ghougassian; Tom Samuelian; Shushan Karapetian and Ara Sanjian, all endowed with Ph.D.s. Salpi Ghazarian is not a Ph.D., but has been a well-informed and steadfast colleague. I thank them all and apologize to others whom I have failed to mention.
Let me begin with a few personal remarks. I am a diaspora Armenian by ancestry and upbringing. My ancestors left Sebastia and settled in the newly emerging small town of Bardizag just after 1600 CE. My father was born there in 1913, survived the Genocide, then lived and worked in Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and the United States — seven countries. I have lived in four of those countries, but when my odd name leads new American acquaintances to ask where I am from, I say “the Armenian Diaspora.” This puzzles them, because the Diaspora is not a geographic site, but also leads to interesting conversations.
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In 1994, at age 50, I visited Armenia for the first time. On my way back, I stopped in Paris. One day, the editor of Haratch, Arpik Missakian, invited me and a group of Armenians from France, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria — all writers for her newspaper — to visit Giverny, where Claude Monet lived and worked for decades. Sitting around a table where the dominant language was Western Armenian, but the vocabulary abundantly included French, English, Turkish and Arabic words and expressions, I suddenly, powerfully, happily and sadly realized that I was at that moment more at home, more easily myself, than I had ever felt in two emotionally powerful weeks in Armenia. I was in diaspora, where I am from, where I belong.
I have worked on diaspora studies from two different positions and perspectives. First, starting in 1975, I worked as a diasporic intellectual, who lectured and published dozens of essays and commentaries in Armenian about Armenian diasporic existence. Second, since the early 1990s, I have worked as an American scholar, primarily specializing in diaspora studies. I lecture and write in English on topics that include, but are not limited to, the analysis of the Armenian Diaspora.
Over time, I have been asked by non-Armenians to comment on a large range of diaspora-related topics. But as an Armenian intellectual, the number of topics about which I am questioned by fellow Armenians diminishes.
The question I am most frequently and predictably asked is whether the Diaspora will survive, and if so, how, for how long and in what shape or form.
Of course, there can be no simple, single answer, though those who ask usually think there is. Many can’t wait to tell me the answer to their own question. They affirm that the Armenian Diaspora will disappear in two generations — some say one, some say three, but for whatever reason, two is the most common answer — so, in 50 years. Usually, they identify the two strongest factors contributing to decline as mixed marriages and the loss of the Western Armenian language. By contrast, those who believe the Diaspora will survive seem to believe that the decisive factor is and will remain the existence of the Republic of Armenia. When pressed to explain how and what the Republic’s government and people, as well as the Diaspora’s institutions and people, are doing that will assure this survival, specifics become elusive. However, the conviction remains and nowadays has a distinct form derived from Prime Minister Pashinyan’s discourse: the claim is that strong statehood will guarantee not only a stronger Republic of Armenia but a stronger Diaspora.
Tonight, I will try to slow down and consider both the state of the Diaspora and the state of Armenia’s Bedutyun, or capital-S State, the term that the ruling government now prefers to “Republic” or “Hayrenik.” To anticipate and calm any political worries that my remarks might induce among you, I will begin by expressing some of my convictions without explaining the grounds of those convictions at length. If you wish, we can discuss them later.
My first assertion is that diasporas have almost always been oriented towards either a real existing or a “lost” homeland. History’s most scrutinized diaspora, the Jewish one, existed with only a remembered homeland, not an actual one. Crushed by the Roman Empire, the land of Israel was nearly empty of Jews from 135 CE to around 1880 CE and had no Jewish state until 1948. By contrast, old and new Armenian diasporas always had not just the memory but the reality of a homeland, ruled by others but still there, partially or largely inhabited by Armenian natives — in locations like Cilicia, or elsewhere in the Ottoman or Persian or Russian empires, then in Soviet Armenia. There has never been a time when diaspora Armenians were completely deprived of some fragment of the actual homeland that was still inhabited by fellow Armenians.
This presence of a remembered or actual homeland has been almost entirely true of diasporas, but as is the case with most generalizations, there is one exception, a people known by a variety of names: The Roma, the Romani, the Gypsies, the Tziganes, the Lom, the Գնչու (Gnchu). Some time between 500 and 800 CE, one branch of the nomadic peoples of northern India moved west, out of India and kept moving, through Iran and Armenia and onwards to Europe. There is considerable evidence that they lingered in Armenia long enough to borrow some elements of the Armenian language. Remarkably, they did not retain or cherish the memory of their homeland. Discriminated against by all, and in reaction to that discrimination, they developed a strong sense of their own distinct identity with no reference at all to a homeland.
In 2005, I participated in a conference in Barcelona on the diasporas of Europe, where many Roma representatives were present and spoke. There was virtually no mention of a homeland. 14 years later, in 2019, when I lectured at a conference on the Roma at Harvard, scholars from the community mentioned that a number of predominantly young students were traveling to northwestern India and Pakistan to see if they could determine the precise homeland range of their ancestors.
The point is that even the one diasporan people who managed to endure for 1,500 years without remembering a homeland are now looking for a homeland to remember.
I must stress that for much of history, remembering a homeland has not always meant yearning for a state. The bantoukhds, migrant Armenians singing Կռունկ ուստի կու գաս, were not asking the crane about the State of Armenia — they were asking about a village, a town, a home or homeland. It is true that, as early as the late 18th century, some exceptional diaspora Armenians, Nor Jughayetsis living in India, had begun to imagine an Armenian state, but they were truly exceptional; that aspiration only became generally shared around 1900.
Today, the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is working to transform that centuries-old diasporic tradition of yearning for and loyalty to the indeterminate boundaries of a homeland into a new, altered, geographically constrained commitment to the Republic of Armenia, conceived as the State. He has concluded that he can secure peace with Azerbaijan and coexistence with Turkey only if he can make significant concessions to which diasporans, committed to a larger homeland, object vehemently — as do many inhabitants of Armenia sharing similar beliefs.
I have so far avoided the vocabulary of nationalism and of identity, but will use it now. The current government of Armenia views, as a potential problem, those who identify primarily as members of the Armenian nation and not, first and foremost, as citizens of the currently existing Armenian nation-state that is the Republic of Armenia. To address that problem, the government seeks to shape new Armenian citizens who, whether living in or beyond the borders of the Republic, will not continue to think of themselves primarily as members of the Armenian people who lived for two millennia in a larger territory called Armenia — about parts of which they may still maintain dreams and claims, whether those parts are called Artsakh or Kars, Van or Sassoun.
The solution the current leadership is striving for is to persuade its people to abstain from the vocabulary and ideology of national identity and to start thinking of themselves as committed and contented citizens of the internationally recognized Republic of Armenia. While many Armenians in the diaspora, and some in the homeland who are committed to a concept of the nation, feel that this shift of commitments to a constrained, existing nation-state is problematic — even scandalous — there is some evidence that many citizens of Armenia agree with their Prime Minister; their concerns are not Karabakh or Western Armenia but how to live prosperously as citizens of the current Republic of Armenia, keeping open the option of emigrating to Los Angeles and without having to worry about sending their sons to fight and die again. They will not be chanting Միացում /Miatsum any time soon, as they did in 1988.
In this context, it is problematic that, in the past 35 years, so many citizens of Armenia — by some estimates as few as 750,000, by others at least a million — have left the Republic, emigrating and choosing to live outside of Armenia as a dispersion, a transnational population, perhaps a diaspora — or perhaps, not yet a diaspora. There is room for argument.
For Prime Minister Pashinyan, those who held or still hold Armenian citizenship but live outside the Republic are his constituency, an entity distinct from the older western Armenian diaspora, and he considers it important to work with the former, organize them, lead them, perhaps also to serve them.
The High Commissioner for Diaspora Affairs, Zareh Sinanian, nominally responsible for working with the whole diaspora, is primarily tasked to focus on the quasi-diasporic population of citizens who have left the Republic of Armenia.
Soon after he was appointed, on June 17, 2019, Mr. Sinanian stated in an interview with Azatutyun Radio: “Honestly, I will concentrate on Russia a little because it has a very large [Armenian] community; it’s very important and it’s also our strategic ally.” Setting aside the no longer sustainable description of Russia as a reliable strategic ally, it is essential to acknowledge the priorities of the High Commissioner’s office.
His difficult job is, above all, to develop connections with and, when possible, guide the expatriate citizens who have left the Republic of Armenia but retain some links to it, whether they live in Moscow or Chuvashia, or, for that matter, in Barcelona or Los Angeles. In theory, it is also Commissioner Sinanian’s task to develop strong links between the Republic and the descendants of Western Armenian survivors of genocide, and also with such exceptional quasi-diasporic groups as Istanbul Armenians. He works at the task intermittently, but there should be no confusion as to the priorities he is tasked with.
Elites in the Armenian Diaspora are often indignant about the ways in which the current government of Armenia seems to neglect or fragment what they regard as The Diaspora. While from their perspective this is entirely understandable, it is also necessary to grasp Yerevan’s rival perspective. Based on its behavior since 2018, I would say that, like all governments in charge of a State, Armenia’s leaders have thought about what version of Diaspora and, along with it, what variant form of Armenian national identity will best serve their vision of how to govern Armenia effectively. By “govern,” I mean to guide a variety of controversial endeavors, from the teaching of history to the steering of foreign policy. They have concluded that the imagined community of a Nation made up of a Diaspora and of the homeland population does not lead to a situation that is most responsive to their conceptualization of how to govern effectively.
This is unusual but not unique. Homeland governments routinely look for support and consent, not dissent, from their diasporas: they seek economic support and political assistance through lobbying, they try to harness diasporic soft power but still elicit concessions to, and reconciliation with, the homeland government’s views, not challenges to it. This is best achieved when a particular government manages to identify and equate itself with the near-sanctity of the State.
Some of the attendees of Prof. Khachig Tololyan’s lecture at the Hamazkayin New York Chapter’s Zoom meeting organized by Dr. Herand Markarian (Photo via V.H. Apelian’s blog)
We can see the successful combination of the courtship and bullying of diasporas by homeland governments in the cases of small Israel and huge India. This combination of approaches does not always succeed, as was seen in the case of the Filipino diaspora’s organized resistance to Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship between 1973 and 1986. But usually, it does work. Armenian scholars and analysts have not done a good job of studying these phenomena. One exception is Kristin Cavoukian, whose dissertation, submitted to the University of Toronto’s department of political science in 2016 and titled Identity Gerrymandering: How the Armenian State Constructs and Controls “its” Diaspora, deserves engagement that I do not have the time to provide now.
So far, I have been discussing the Armenian Diaspora primarily in relation to the government and State of Armenia. I want now to consider Diaspora as an entity equipped with characteristics of its own. Nevertheless, to do that, I must paradoxically turn once again to the homeland state.
Diasporas are defined by loss, lack, absence. We can sense the dimensions of that lack if we turn back to Republic of Armenia, which has land, a demarcated territory inhabited by a majority-Armenian population that, while it is being diluted by immigration from India, the Philippines, Iran, Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere, will remain a predominantly Armenian society for some time to come, still possessing its own language and culture, however adulterated, and its own economy, however weak and vulnerable, as well its own police and armed forces, however badly equipped and led they are. It is governed by an elected government working within the context of a legitimate, internationally recognized State.
Territory, society, language, culture, an economy, armed forces and a State — these are of inestimable value. They are what any Diaspora lacks and whose absence makes diasporas vulnerable and, when they survive, quite special.
That survival therefore tends to depend disproportionately on what they do still have: portables like religion, culture, history, language, funds and organization.
Lacking their own territory, laws and economy, it is surprising that any diasporas survive at all. Contemporary diasporas are characterized by mobility that can be imposed upon them or that is chosen voluntarily, often both. However, when a diasporic population can remain concentrated and in one place over time, as in Bourj Hammoud in Beirut, or Nor Kyugh in Aleppo, or Issy-les-Moulineaux and Alfortville near Paris, or Glendale and Little Armenia in Los Angeles, a logic of the sedentary takes over, and the infrastructure of diaspora becomes stronger: churches, schools, clubs, increasing involvement in local government and national politics and an energetic social life all facilitate preservation of communal identity for several generations.
But these cannot be counted on to endure for more than a few generations. Ultimately, we must recognize that diasporas cannot count on prolonged stability. Factors as diverse as wars, globalization, financialized capitalism and digital technology alter all environments and challenge most social structures, including diasporas. The latter must therefore develop a mobile and flexible culture of institutions and practices that can both attract individual diasporans to their ranks as members and enable them to develop as bearers of and crucially as actors and producers of some version of Armenian culture and identity.
Two years ago, at a conference in Glendale organized by Viken Hovsepian, I was one of several speakers, along with Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian, Dr. Vahe Sahakyan, Dr. Hayg Oshagan and others, several of whom argued that traditional institutional leadership and authority are declining within the Armenian Diaspora and must reform, renew itself. Often, the leadership is out of touch with the majority of diasporans and, above all, appears to lack the skills of mission renewal and member recruitment. I believed then, and continue to believe now, that traditional diasporic organizations can be re-energized if they recognize certain facts about younger Armenians. I will paraphrase a passage from my Glendale paper:
“It would be a mistake to think that Americans, including young Armenian American men and women trying to make their way in business and the professions, are indifferent to political issues or social action. Many care. But they do not want to join long-established organizations with traditions, rules, plans and intentions they had no role in formulating and that remain inflexible or are changing too slowly to suit them. Whereas they join organizations reluctantly, they often join projects eagerly. Some create projects and recruit others of their own age group and are active for months or at most two or three years. Later, as they age, they still do not join organizations easily, except when they find movements that sponsor activities conceived and organized in response to contemporary issues and often led by the young for the young. They are willing to be active in groups, to develop projects concerning causes and pursuits they consider worthwhile but neglected. It is true that even when such activities and projects are hosted and funded by traditional groups, they mostly do not lead to eventual commitment by most of the young to membership in the sponsoring, long-standing organizations. Only a minority of those engaged do so. And yet it is often from the ranks of this maturing minority that future leaders will emerge. Traditional Armenian organizations might want to learn to accommodate, host and support the activities and projects of younger individuals and small groups, even when they are not yet members and do not promise an immediate pay-off. They are investments in the future.”
Recruiting younger members of the diasporic community is important, but renewal has taken other forms as well, since, let us say, 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Genocide. Institutions decline but can also revive, becoming invigorated by changes in leadership. Recently, we see this happen with organizations like Gulbenkian and AGBU; in both, it is not a sudden increase in funds that is galvanizing the organizations, but the hope and energy emanating from new leadership. Furthermore, since 1965, in the Armenian American Diaspora but also in France and Britain, a few relatively new institutions have emerged that do fine work. Since 1965, starting with the initiative of NAASR, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research, a number of university Armenian Chairs have been established in the U.S.; they and the re-energized Society of Armenian Studies are responsible for ideas and activity whose nature, value and role in rewriting the discourse and agendas of younger Armenians are unfortunately not well explained to, or understood by, the Armenian diasporic public.
A century ago, one of the founders of modern sociology, Max Weber, described the trajectory of major new movements as beginning with potent, persuasive, charismatic leaders — Jesus was his main example, but he and other scholars also mention the Buddha and the Rasul, the Prophet Muhammad, as charismatic leaders, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., Lenin and Adolf Hitler. In 1962, when I was a recently arrived immigrant kid in the U.S., an ARF elder told me that he became the person and the Armenian he was thanks to what he described as the “charisma” of General Garegin Njdeh, who toured the U.S. in the 1930s. Parenthetically, I should add that while most such leaders are male, there are also charismatic female figures, ranging from Joan of Arc to Aimee Semple McPherson, a founder of what became the Protestant denomination of the Adventists.
In all cases, as Weber argued, after the death of the charismatic leader, the movement of his or her followers must be successfully “bureaucratized,” developing rules and procedures that harness their energy and guide them. Think St. Paul and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church after Jesus or Nehru after Gandhi. The organizations they then create must renew themselves or suffer the consequences: St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi helped to revitalize and extend the life of the Catholic Church.
New charismatic and bureaucratized leadership and new movements can arise every few generations. I am arguing that this has happened in the Armenian Diaspora and can still happen, even though the nature and organization of new, emergent movements is likely to differ significantly.
As has been pointed out in different ways by many, including myself, Hratch Tchilingirian and Tom Samuelian, leader-driven organizations have emerged in the Armenian Diaspora for a long time. Such leaders do not act alone but are perceived to do so and are remembered as such: the ARF’s three founders are well-known, but those who built up the movement in the last decade of the 19th century, much less so. Similarly, Boghos Nubar Pasha is remembered and revered, but the 10 other Armenian men who joined him on the AGBU’s founding day are not. These organizations are driven at first by charismatic individual leaders. It is unclear whether and when they will be successfully bureaucratized and turn into diasporic membership organizations of longer durability — or even whether the founders want that or can make that happen.
The point is that the health of the Armenian Diaspora depends on both new charismatic leaders and successful bureaucratization that draws on the commitments and energies of new, younger members who can be induced to join and to innovate within the traditions of the organizations: today, the Homenetmen and perhaps the AGBU are relatively good examples of such self-renewal. I will conspicuously not comment on the Armenian Church and religious organizations of the Diaspora; I lack the detailed knowledge. But it would be a mistake to neglect their role and the potential for innovative charismatic leadership and of reorganization. The Diaspora is still, to a significant degree, a people of its churches. Furthermore, it’s no accident that charisma, the Weberian concept, is intimately related to chrism or միւռոն, the consecrating oil of Armenian Christianity. Religion and politics can both be renewed by new leaders, for good or ill, as a social movement. Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood are one (dark) example of that.
I will end by turning to an aspect of diasporic life that links it to the Republic of Armenia in endless and insoluble controversy. That topic is the place and fate of Western Armenian. It is the language in which I have thought, felt and written all my life. I cherish it and its traditions. Currently, it is alive and vibrant in the hands of a small elite. As Vahe Oshagan once did, Marc Nichanian, Krikor Beledian and Vehanush Tekian still wield it with great effect. Unknown to most, Western Armenian is currently a rich and vital instrument of thought and artistic expression for the few. Yet, it is also in great danger as a general instrument of thought, feeling and ordinary communication. As I said earlier, many feel that it is indispensable to the survival of the diaspora. It may well be, but in what form? Lip service aside, it is dismissed in Armenia, often mocked. Sossie Kasbarian reported a few days ago that in Yerevan, she spoke in Western Armenian to a middle-aged local man who was working as a reception guard, who apologetically replied to her in Russian, saying sorry, but he did not speak English.
Some time ago, Tom Samuelian said that “arguably, the lingua franca of the Armenian people is English, the most widely known and used language among Armenians worldwide. Indeed, one can observe ostensibly trilingual young Armenians in Yerevan who know Armenian, Russian and English, who switch to English on many contemporary topics — and not just technical/scientific, but economics, politics, sociology.” I would add that among us and many other peoples, great and small, the language of musical and other popular cultures is increasingly English, the lingua franca of global capitalism. In this context, it may be relevant to recall that until 1999, contestants in the Eurovision Song Contest were required to sing in one of the official languages of the country they represented. The rules were changed and after 1999, most winners of the contest have sung in English.
Finally, we know of diasporas that have survived without their native languages: the Jews without Hebrew but with Yiddish and Judaeo-Arabic, the Irish without Gaelic but rather speaking the language of the hated oppressor, English, just as many Armenians spoke Turkish.
My own belief is that Western Armenian will survive as the beloved language of an elite minority and will continue to play a significant cultural role.
I will end by reminding us that the world changes unpredictably and more rapidly than before. No one, not the CIA and not the KGB, anticipated the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. No one realized how short the unilateral U.S. domination of the world would endure — around 10 years. When Deng Xiaoping told the Chinese people in 1979 that it would be okay to start making money if they could in their impoverished economy, no one foresaw that in less than 50 years that economy would begin to draw even with that of the U.S.
And on January 1, 1983, when the Internet first became formalized, no one understood that the world would be reshaped by what I have come to call the cyberlords: the Zucks and the Musks. Today, we do not know how nation-states smaller than China and the U.S. will be doing in a generation, and of course, we cannot reliably anticipate how the Armenian Diaspora will be doing. But faith combined with imaginative action accomplish unexpected victories, even in the chaos of the contemporary world.
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