Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
CENTRAL ASIAN SURVEY, cilt.1, ss.1-22, 2026 (SSCI, Scopus)
This article examines how the Ahıska Turks – deported from Georgia to Central Asia in 1944 – sustain cultural continuity and reconstitute belonging under shifting post-Soviet political and institutional regimes. Drawing on published documentary collections and intergenerational oral histories (2005–2025), it analyses how language practices, ritual calendars and diaspora organizations operate as infrastructures of belonging that reproduce memory and solidarity across dispersed geographies. Conceptualizing ‘citizenship-in-exile’ not as a legal status but as a lived condition of cultural resilience, the article situates the Ahıska case within debates on diaspora governance and post-socialist transformations. Engaging recent discussions in Central Asian Survey on identity, informality and visibility regimes, the analysis shows how social infrastructures mediate tensions between displacement, adaptation and heritage preservation. Findings indicate that cultural sustainability emerges through the interplay of memory work, community institutions and transnational mobility, offering a concise framework for understanding belonging in post-deportation and post-Soviet contexts, with implications for future research.