“Diasporic Strategies, Stateless Action,”

 Prof. Khachig Tölölyan 

On Wednesday May 21, 2015. Prof. Khachig Tölölyan lectured to an audience that had come together having accepted the public invitation of the Dr. Herand Markarian on behalf of the NY Hamazkayin Chapter. The title of the Prof. Khachig Tölölyan’s address was “The Armenian Diaspora: “Today, and  Perhaps Tomrrow.” The text of his address is not available yet.  Prof. Khachig Tölölyan also delivered the keynote address at the conference organized by Viken Hovsepian for the Los Angeles Armenian community’s PAC Leadership: “Diasporic Strategies, Stateless Action,” It was delivered in Glendale, CA., 29 April 2023. I have attached the text of that address he referenced in his May 21, 2025 address.

 

A partial view of the attendees of Prof. Khachig Tololyan's address at the NY Hamazkayin Chapter's soom meeting organized by Dr. Herand Markarian

Between 1995 and 2000, a sociology professor at Harvard named Robert Putnam developed a concept he named “bowling alone.” With historical analysis and extensive statistics, he showed that the American nation had started out as a society of joiners. The French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville had noted in the 1830s, after traveling all over the US, that Americans eagerly joined not just church-related but also civic social organizations and kept inventing new ones enthusiastically. By World War II, even small towns had several such organizations – we still know some of them, like the Elks and the Shriners, the Masons and the Knights of Columbus, the Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs; women had the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the National Organization of Women Voters and dozens based on domestic life and hobbies. There were also bowling leagues everywhere, for every race, gender and class. However, Putnam showed, starting in 1948, TV started to keep families at home watching, and this trend accelerated with the rise of the computer and online networks. As a result, fewer people showed up for volunteer organizations – and while people still bowled, they did so “alone”, which is to say with just family or a few close friends; they declined to join bowling leagues. The cell phone and social media, not yet invented when Putnam first wrote, have accelerated this trend.

I begin with this example because I think it illustrates a social reality that affects Armenian diaspora communities. After the genocide and the 1923 Lausanne treaty whose centenary we note this year, wherever diaspora communities developed, they were characterized by Armenians establishing and joining numerous organizations.  These could be compatriotic, social, political, educational, philanthropic. They developed old media, primarily in newspaper form, but also there was a proliferation of youth-centered and athletic organizations, and of course church-connected groups. Some of these categories have changed more than others – for example, a hundred years ago, a new Armenian elementary school that opened in Aleppo was the modest but hopeful shape of diasporic education; now a new multimillion dollar Chair in Armenian Studies carries a similar valence of hope and possibility. In addition, a few innovative organizations have emerged and endured, notably the Armenian Assembly, now 51 years old, and the Zoryan Institute, now 41-years old. These old and new organizations and institutions remain a key element of how Armenian diasporas work. 

Except that they are not working well now. Our experience as active Armenians suggests this, and surveys like the Gulbenkian’s ADS, Armenian Diaspora Survey, hint at it. Diaspora Armenians and especially the young are reluctant to join organizations. Metaphorically speaking, they bowl alone.

I mention this reluctance to join, this refusal to be recruited to traditional organizations, because I regard you, my audience, as the managerial elite of this diaspora community, as the executives and intellectuals in charge of the organizations that constitute the infrastructure of Armenian Los Angeles.  You face such local challenges, but others on the national and transnational levels also face similar issues. 

You might be interested to hear what diaspora studies has to offer as ways of addressing this trend. The bad news is that diaspora studies has very little to say about it that is helpful. I am a retired professor who has read a couple of thousand articles and several hundred books on diasporas, and participated in over a hundred national and international conferences on diasporas and transnationalism. But I have heard practically no extended, detailed and pragmatic analyses of this topic, except in a few discussions of the Jewish diaspora. Yet by one estimate, there are now 119 diasporas, a number that keeps growing because many scholars regard as diasporas all transnational communities recently shaped by migration. Despite the numbers, specific problems encountered by local organizational efforts that sustain diaspora communities are not discussed. Diasporas are discussed at a larger scale, past and present conditions and problems are documented and analyzed, but specific solutions are not usually offered. Scholars tend to offer Վերլուծում but not լուծում, analyses but not solutions, except when we join the army of professional consultants who move from analysis to strong recommendations and sometimes prescribe a course of action that might lead to actual solutions – often, I will add, bogus solutions. 

My talk today is that of a professor who wishes he could put on a consultant hat and recommend real solutions. Unable to do that, I will do what I can to reorient perspectives so that we can rethink together the contemporary situation of the Armenian diaspora and what we might be able to do in it with different perspectives, analyses and attitudes.

On the question of recruiting the young, I will offer comments based on my fifty years of experience teaching and observing the behavior of American college students aged 18-22. 

They are intensely engaged by questions of individual and social identity and issues of personal exploration and growth – questions others may discuss today, about which I will only say now that sadly, the young do not see devoted participation in traditional organizations as pathways to personal growth. The Yale historian Michael Denning once said that in the 1930s, being a member of the American Communist party was not just a political position, it was the path for constructing an identity. The same may have been said about some Armenian political parties. No longer. Educated American youth, white or non-white, whether coming from wealthy, upper class or poor families, avoid traditional organizations. Fraternity participation has declined from 80 to 20 percent of the student body at elite colleges. Membership in on-campus political groups has declined drastically. 

And yet it would be a mistake to think that these young Americans are indifferent to political issues or social action. They remain passionate. But they do not want to join long-established organizations with traditions and rules they have had no part in formulating, with plans and intentions formulated over time and changing too slowly to suit them. They join organizations reluctantly, but join projects eagerly. Some create projects and recruit fellow students to them, and are active for months or at most two or three years while on campus. Later, as they mature in the world, postgraduates who remain in contact with me still do not report joining organizations except when they find ones that sponsor activities conceived and organized by the young for the young. For example, they join theater groups that put on one act plays by minority youth; they undertake difficult small group hikes on the Appalachian trail; they join book clubs oriented to specific topics like climate change or glaring economic inequality; they volunteer for political campaigns in urban neighborhoods; they use new media collaboratively to make documentaries, etc. They are eager to be active in groups, to develop projects concerning causes and pursuits they consider worthwhile but neglected.  Even when such activities and projects are hosted and funded by traditional groups, they mostly do not lead to eventual commitment to the sponsoring long-standing organizations, except by a minority of those engaged. And yet it is often from the ranks of this maturing minority that future leaders will emerge.  Traditional Armenian organizations might want to learn to accommodate, host and support the activities and projects of such individuals and small groups even when they do not promise an immediate pay-off. They are investments in the future.

The announced title of my talk is ‘diasporic strategies and stateless power.’ The extended example I just offered illustrates one possible “strategy” for diasporic organization. Before I move on to the topic of stateless power, I want to stress that in my view the adoption of new strategies in diaspora is no longer optional. Innovative risks must be taken. The first factor that limits and constrains the adoption of new strategies is the lack of imagination and the hesitation of leaders to take action when quick and concrete results are not guaranteed.   It is feared that investment in new projects cannot be justified to the organization’s membership because immediate results and pay-offs may be far off. But refusal to invest in such long-rage recruitment is no longer an option, in my view.

I will add without developing the topic that diaspora Armenians have demonstrated a willingness to invest in the Republic of Armenia and Artsakh, in projects that have not only been useful but also imaginative on some occasions. From TUMO to reforestation, from the founding of AUA to the support extended to organizations that protect abused women, or certain environmentally oriented NGOs, diasporic investment has sometimes shown that it can be simultaneously imaginative and practical. Ironically, a comparable imaginative support of practical new initiatives and investments in diaspora institutions have not kept pace. It is of course understandable that the homeland should stimulate our donations and investments. But the diaspora, by definition, does not live in the homeland. As we never tire of saying, close to two thirds of all Armenians don’t – they live in diaspora. If they are to continue to exist, function and develop as diasporas, they will need imaginative organizational investment. Their infrastructure must be constantly renewed. The diaspora needs that for its own sake and for the sake of the homeland. For many decades to come, Armenia will need the diaspora. 

To support this claim, I will permit myself a small detour from the main issues of this talk and stress that Israel, currently an extraordinarily successful and increasingly problematic state, needed the Jewish diaspora from 1880, when immigration to Palestine began to develop, to 1897, when Zionism emerged, and then until 1948, when the State of Israel came into being; it then needed its diaspora again, to support its development on every front, until Israel’s economy became fully self-sufficient, around 1990. So for a total of 110 years, from 1880 to 1990, the demographic, political, military and economic development of Israel needed the diaspora. It needed both what the Jewish diaspora sent directly and what it persuaded and pressured others to send, especially the USA and Germany. I want to give you a sense of the scale of what the Jewish diaspora and the allies it recruited achieved. Israel was founded on May 11, 1948. From 1950 to 1965, Israel’s real GNP grew at an annual rate of over 11 percent because Israel was receiving huge capital inflows. The US made what are called “unilateral transfers”, aka gifts to Israel; it also loaned money at favorable rates. Germany, though shattered by World War II and busy rebuilding, nevertheless started to pay reparations to individual survivors after 1952, as it should have, but also made payments to the state of Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli bonds sold to the diaspora raised large sums; the Jewish Agency coordinated astonishing annual diasporic fund drives specifically for agriculture and immigrant settlement – housing, keeping new immigrants fed and clothed and in school until they found jobs. The sums raised annually, consistently, to support both the local activities of American Jewish organizations and Israel, are stupendous. For me as a diaspora specialist, reading around in the American Jewish Yearbook: The Annual Record of the North American Jewish Communities, published since 1899, is simultaneously a humbling and inspiring experience.

That minor digression over, I will now turn to the other part of my title, ‘stateless power.’ I have been using the term since 1995 to designate ways in which diasporas or their constitutive organizations may exercise something called ‘power’. Some have welcomed the term, a few have criticized it directly and orally, and most have expressed skepticism. To be diasporized, scattered and stateless has long been synonymous with powerlessness. At a moment in Armenian history when we all celebrate պետութիւն and պետականութիւն, state and statehood, what can it mean to also claim some form of power for պետութենազուրկ, stateless diasporas?

Most observers who like to think of themselves as realists believe that at least in the Western world, since 1648 and the Treaty of Westphalia, power has belonged to the state. That is certainly true about a certain kind of power: the state can kill legally, in that it can execute its own citizens for crimes; it can also send its citizens to fight in wars, to kill and to die. Thus the state has a ‘monopoly on legitimate violence’, as Max Weber affirmed. This is disputed by rebels and terrorists, but otherwise settled. We can find occasions in which non-state entities, including diasporic organizations, have killed members of their communities – Palestinians have done it, and as Professor Ara Sanjian’s research has shown, during the first Lebanese civil war of 1958, Armenian organizations and lawless individuals also did, killing around 35 fellow Armenians. But the point is that the exercise of such power is widely considered both exceptional and illegitimate. 

However, there are other definitions of power. For decades, political scientists debated Robert Dahl’s classic affirmation that power means “the ability of A to compel B to do something he or she would not otherwise do.” This definition extends the possibility of who can hold and exercise power beyond the state and legitimized violence. In his early articles and major books, like Polyarchy, Dahl was arguing that democracies were governed by numerous but still a quite limited number of groups of actors – wealthy elites, corporations, some civic organizations all had and exercised power. He did not specify any diasporas, but did argue that foreign policy is not simply established by some abstract entity, called the State, for the benefit of an equally abstract entity, the Nation. The nation-state, the ազգ-պետութիւն, theoretically responds through democratic voting to the needs and views of all citizens. In practice, nation-states and their foreign policies are shaped by the hugely uneven participation of a small number of actors, and nothing prevents diasporic groups from being among those who exercise or try to exercise such power. The Jewish diaspora has long recognized this, the Greek diaspora has tried and failed to organize for this purpose, and the activities and commitments of the Armenian Assembly and the ANC indicate that the Armenian American community recognizes this, although we avoid the term power and speak instead of “influence.”

Finally, there is a third concept of power, whose origins are too tangled and convoluted to summarize here, but which can be exemplified for us today by the name of Michel Foucault, the French intellectual who is the most cited, most quoted intellectual of the West between 1960 and 2000. Two of his terms relevant to us today are pouvoir/savoir meaning power/knowledge, and governmentality, a single compound word he invented combining the words “govern” and “mentality”. My colleague Vahe Sahakian has thought more about governmentality than I have, but I have thought about Foucault’s assertion that in the modern era the exercise of power is inseparable from knowledge. To simplify, it’s not just that “knowledge is power,” it’s that governments need knowledge to exercise power, while those who create new knowledge by a variety of means, do so with an awareness of power, working with and sometimes against it. The purpose of saying this is to remind us that diasporas and other minorities can specialize in the generation of certain kinds of knowledge that can shape the environment in which power operates and can lead power to new conclusions and new actions. In addition, the practice of power/knowledge is linked to the soft power of performance. You may not link the performance of music or the writing of articles and novels to power, but in fact repeated and effective performance reshapes collective consciousness. In this perspective, Vahe Berberian and Ruben Hakhverdian, Atom Egoyan and Serj Tankian, Peter Bakalian and Richard Hovannisian, Vahe Oshagan and Armenchik are all exercising various forms of soft power that involves either knowledge or performance or both, in a way that can reshape both a diasporic community and its larger interlocutors. To repeat, these are some of the ways in which diasporas exercise stateless power.

I want to close by returning to the Armenian diaspora in the US, particularly here in Los Angeles, and to say more about the kind of engagement projects in which Armenian organizations can exercise stateless power or diasporic soft power. The area of such activity I want to discuss is involvement in electoral politics. You are all familiar with such involvement, so in a sense I am in danger of telling you what you know. But I hope that by presenting in a less familiar frame the kind of activity that the Armenian Assembly and the Armenian National Committee carry out, I will be able to underline the indispensable nature of that engagement project in a fresh way. Once again, as with Putnam’s Bowling Alone, I will move back and forth between the scholarly and the actuality of daily life as it is practiced by community leadership elites like yourselves.

Political sociologists have studied the relationship between ethnic populations and elections for a century. Until recently, the model that shaped their analyses and their advice to campaign managers had to do with the fact that new immigrants, both the ethnic and the diasporic, settled in large urban areas where they could find work – the nineteenth century Irish in Boston and New York, the 20^th Century Poles in Chicago, then the African Americans from the South in all major northern cities, etc. Within these communities, certain processes happened linearly or serially – first the immigrants became economically integrated; then socially and linguistically; finally, ethnic political entrepreneurs emerged and, working against or allied with the dominant old white elites, recruited the immigrants’ descendants into political campaigns. What has changed is due to the belated understanding that immigrants, including Armenians, now move directly into suburbs that sociologists have characterized as “ethnoburbs” which can be mobilized by ethnic and diasporic entrepreneurs before their full social and cultural integration happens. In studies of the Armenians of Hollywood, Glendale and the San Fernando Valley, the sociological pioneer has been a scholar named Daniel Ferrante, whose new book will be appearing from Cornell University Press soon, but whose articles have already appeared in the past five years. Ferrante identifies figures from among LA Armenians, also from the Taiwan Chinese settling in Monterey and some other groups as pioneers in ethnoburban political entrepreneurship. Paul Krekorian, Raffi Mouradian, Ardashes-Ardy Kassakhian and Adrin Nazarian are figures that emerge in this perspective as being different from earlier figures such as Walter Karabian and Governor George Deukmejian. These ethnic entrepreneurs do not just ask for money; they ask for votes from voters they themselves can organize because suburban Armenians have been politically integrated, reversing the old patterns of social and cultural integration coming first. Extrapolating from what Fittante argues in scholarly detail, I would say that he is making an argument for stateless power: in any situation where most voters are from multiple suburban ethnic communities, a minority community, well organized and led, can hold the balance of power in elections and gain influence at the state and federal levels out of proportion to its numbers. Educating young and ambitious leadership cadres in this kind of work, which has been done before but not systematically and armed with power-knowledge, should be one of the enterprises of the near future. 

I said “should be.” Scholars are trained not to say that – instead they/we say things like X is recommended or Y should be considered. I will describe two more things that I think should be and sit down. First, Armenian leadership everywhere knows that Unity is a good and safe thing to advocate. It is also an unhelpful idea, because in the near future it can’t be realized any more than the Sevres treaty can become a norm in international affairs. I would urge leaders not to set up unattainable feel-good goals and to say instead, in Armenian, ոչ միութիւն այլ միասին։ Not Unity but Solidarity, not unity but acting together on specific issues. In the circumstances of ordinary life, long before unity, effective cooperation must be mastered. There are exceptions – in the days just before Sardarabad, the people who fought didn’t wait for the practice of cooperation; squadrons of Armenians from the former Tsarist army, members of several political parties, fedayees, and peasants barely armed with old muskets went to the front together because it was fight together or die together. It was a moment analogous to the one in 1792 in the French revolution when the Marseillaise urged “Aux armes, citoyens!” But the Sardarabad unity lasted less than three months and the rest of the politics of the Republic of Armenia was still that of distinct groups trying to work together for different goals, or not. Our nation went to Versailles in 1919 with a Badviragutyun-Delegation from the Republic of Armenia headed by Avetis Aharonyan and another from the western Armenian diaspora symbolically headed by Boghos Noubar Pasha. At a moment when the Treaty of Versailles was working out the post-War reality of the defeated Ottoman Empire, we felt as a people that we needed two representatives. Fortunately, the evidence is that except for the image of non-Unity, more damage was not done to the Armenian cause by that dual presence. They weren’t united but they had solidarity, they worked together. At least they were Միասին եթէ ոչ միացեալ։

And finally, I want to urge the leadership gathered here today to try to address problems in a way that seems deeply counter-intuitive, in a way that you might even think is irresponsible. I invite you to make analyses and decisions not primarily based on the past, nor on your anticipation of the future. The Armenian collective mind does not handle decisions based on the past or anticipated future well. With my consultant hat on, and with an apology for lecturing at you, I end by saying that you and we all should try harder to plan and act on the basis of a cold-eyed assessment of the present, the here and now. Թող ձեր կարգախօսը ըլլայ

Հոս եւ Հիմա: Thank you.