Transformation of Diasporas from a Labour Movement towards a Transnational Religious Movement: The Alevi Diaspora in Germany and Australia

This is a study about how destination countries affect the community formation and development of Alevis—a particular group from Turkey. Although there is a great amount of research on the effects of immigration on receiving countries, less consideration has been given to how the approach towards immigrants adopted by receiving states impacts on migrants’ cultural and religious practices as well as their diasporic community formation. Moreover, existing research essentialises diasporas as homogenous groups merely on the basis of common attachment to their homelands. The literature has not only ignored internal differences related to ethnicity, religion or class, but has also conceptualised them as static entities. Diasporas, however—like any other social group—can change over time and continue their activities under different frameworks. This is also true of existing Alevi studies: most explore the question of ‘why the Alevi movement emerged’ but none adopts a dynamic perspective to investigate changes within the movement. By incorporating diaspora mobilisation literature with social movement theories, this thesis specifically explores the question: ‘How did the Alevi diaspora emerge and change over time in different contexts?’. It examines the cases of Germany and Australia, two countries with very different historical traditions towards migrants, from a multi-scalar perspective that considers the shifting transnational and national ‘political opportunity structures’. It focuses on the period between the 1960s (when Turkey signed its first bilateral migration agreements) and 2013. The fieldwork for this study was carried out in both countries between 2012 and 2013, and the data collection methods were policy analysis, archival research, participant observation and semistructured in-depth interviews with 70 Alevi participants. The results show that Alevis who were initially part of the labour movement in the 1960s and 1970s in both Germany and Australia started organising around a newly emerging secular cultural identity movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and around an institutionalised religious/faith-based movement in the 2000s. In Germany, activists ultimately managed to obtain public recognition of Alevism from the German state as a unique religion separate from Islam. In Australia, despite the fact that religious institutions were not promoted in the same way, a similar pattern evolved at the federation level. Activists in both places sought to manage the dispersed Alevi ix population under new and integrative models (such as national federations, supranational institutions and global initiatives) and positioned Alevism largely as a unique faith system in its own right. Overall, these findings suggest that even if national ‘political opportunity structures’ develop in various ways in different countries, a diaspora movement can follow a largely similar path over time due to overarching transnational forces (such as, in this case, the construction of Muslims as a threat to national security in both Germany and Australia and the rise of Islamist politics in Turkey). In Australia, however, the two major organisations disagreed about the definition of Alevism. While the main organisation in Melbourne claimed Alevism as a unique faith system, its counterpart in Sydney sustained the view that Alevism was the true essence of Islam. Hence the case study in Australia suggests that, despite working in the same national political opportunity structures, local-level movements may follow very different routes. Moreover, in both countries, ‘framing contests’ among activists and community members resulted from personal conflicts and differences in political and geographical background, which further illustrates the complexities inherent in a social movement