Ottoman Half-lives: Long-term Perspectives on Particular Forced Migrations

Survivors of violent displacements can usually benefit creatively from a variety of forms of assistance—the granting of citizenship rights, housing aid, provision of land, working capital and jobs. In dealing with emotional and cognitive disruption, they will help each other by sympathy, empathy, and reciprocal support. They may well prefer to marry others like themselves and thus create communities of trust, shared values, and mutual aid which would rejoice social capital theorists. But how they manage their pasts depends not only on their own personal social constructions, but is greatly influenced both by the political attentions they receive in their new situations, and the recognition—or lack of it—accorded by those associated, directly or distantly, with their original losses.