Media and Nationalism Beyond Borders

Abstract

Increased connectedness via communication technologies has augmented a re-orientation of diasporic communities toward their homeland enabling stronger links between various agencies, political parties and movements in the states of origin and a revival of national and religious identities of migrants. Transnational media have played a key part in this by enabling a re-connection of diasporic populations with a mediated homeland. One example where this has occurred is in relation to Turkish and Kurdish media and their audience in Europe. Drawing on two different research projects on migrants’ media consumption practices in Berlin, Stockholm and London in 2009 and 2015 in London, I will argue in this chapter that the mediation of the Turkish and Kurdish ethnonational conflict has played a crucial role in the differentiation and fragmentation of political, ethnic and social identities amongst migrants from Turkey. By reporting on the ethnonational conflict and at the same time attempting to mobilise migrants’ identities for conflicting identities, either Kurdish or Turkish, the transnational media make the conflict an integral part of migrants’ everyday lives in Europe. As a result of this, increasingly ethnonational conflict in the homeland has become more dispersed, delocalized and deterritorialized.