Sticking Together? Georgia’s “Beached” Armenians Between Mobilization and Acculturation

Abstract

As the USSR fell apart and independent countries took its place, minorities across Eurasia found themselves stranded in nationalizing states. This article focuses on one of these "beached diasporas": Georgia's Armenians. Through a mixed-methods approach, consisting of interviews with activists and a sociolinguistic experiment administered to adolescents (N ¼ 529), we uncover differences among Armenians in their reactions to Georgia's nationalization policies. Armenians from the borderland of Javakheti mobilized in defence of the ingroup but their co-ethnics from the capital of Tbilisi opted for acculturation. These intragroup differences demonstrate that members of the same ethnic group can react to the same nationalization policies along disparate lines, thus adding nuance to the literature on beached diasporas in the post-Soviet space.