Enacting Multi-Layered Citizenship: Turkey's Armenians' Struggle for Justice and Equality

Director Fuat Keyman and Bahar Rumelili's article "Enacting Multi-Layered Citizenship: Turkey’s Armenians’ Struggle for Justice and Equality" was published in Citizenship Studies on November 4, 2015.

Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, Turkey’s Armenians have been subjected to a trade-off between the limited minority rights granted by the 1923 Lausanne Treaty and equal national citizenship. Traditionally a closed, depoliticized community, the citizenship practices of the Armenian minority have become increasingly differentiated in recent years. Building on a notion of citizenship as multi-layered and constituted through collective practice, this article investigates the implications of the political acts of Turkey’s Armenian minority on sub-national and national citizenship in Turkey. We show that Turkey’s Armenians are coupling rights demands, identification, normative references, and mobilization at the sub-national, national, and transnational levels in innovative ways, and are thereby negotiating different layers of citizenship in Turkey in a way that strengthens equal national citizenship.