One Homeland or Two?: Territorialization of Identity and the Repatriation Decision Among the Mongolian-Kazakh Diaspora (Research Brief)

The relationship between identity and territorial attachment is an understudied component of social, ethnic, and national consciousness. Understanding this relationship is increasingly important in an international system where interstate mobility1 is leading to heightened conditions of economic, political, and cultural transnationalism and the veracity of any delineation of national loyalties and passions along interstate boundaries is progressively faulty. My dissertation explores the dynamics of homeland formation and reformation among a multi-generational diaspora within the context of the now decade-old independent state of Kazakhstan and the former Soviet sphere-state of Mongolia. My basic questions are: (1) can people have two homelands and (2) what factors are central to the de- and re-territorialization of identity?

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Alexander C. Diener, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was a 2001-02 Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) fellow.