• DOI:10.1080/01419870701491937
• Corpus ID: 143541451

The politics of population in a nation-building process: emigration of non-Muslims from Turkey

@article{Iduygu2008ThePO,
  title={The politics of population in a nation-building process: emigration of non-Muslims from Turkey},
  author={Ahmet Içduygu and Sule Toktas and B. Ali Soner},
  journal={Ethnic and Racial Studies},
  year={2008},
  volume={31},
  pages={358 - 389}
}

• A. Içduygu, Sule Toktas, B. Ali Soner
• Published 16 January 2008
• Sociology
• Ethnic and Racial Studies

Abstract Within the politics of nationalism and nation-building, the emigration of ethnic and religious minorities, whether voluntary or involuntary, appears to be a commonly occurring practice. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, modern Turkey still carried the legacy of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious diversity in which its Armenian, Greek and Jewish communities had official minority status based upon the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. However, throughout the twentieth century, Turkey's non-Muslim minority populations have undergone a mass emigration experience in which thousands of their numbers have migrated to various countries around the globe. While in the 1920s the population of non-Muslims in the country was close to 3 per cent of the total, today it has dropped to less than two per thousand. This article analyses the emigration of non-Muslim people from Turkey and relates this movement to the wider context of nation-building in the country.