Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how communication through the internet becomes a new power to support large-scale production of projecting one's ethnic affinity among Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians. The disjuncture between their imaginary homeland and Syrian state divides their community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how communication through internet and SNS (Social Network Service) promotes indirect communication among Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians, and how it becomes a new power to support large-scale production of projecting one's ethnic affinity. The Diasporic condition of Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians since the late Ottoman period has never come to an end and even accelerated due to the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Their diasporic networks of faith have been constituting transcontinental communities of these Christians. The information disseminated via internet seems to bring dramatic reconfiguration of the world, in particular, their homelands in Syria and Iraq, where the old political structure has destroyed, and where processes for creating a new social order are undergoing. The idioms of their territory, security, and human rights become the emotional fuel for claiming more explicitly violent politics of identity. This situation creates divisions among Syrian/Syriac Orthodox Christians, although they want to construct a unified community and identity. The war provides them not only with an imaginary homeland but also with an opportunity of participating in the movement of reclaiming it. Some support the idea of tracing their origin back to ancient Assyrians, and others claim their Aramean ethnic identity. One of the features of such ethnocultural movements is a battle of the imagination, in which the disjuncture between the Assyrian or Aramean nation and Syrian state becomes a seedbed of brutal separatisms.