Alevi Spatial Politics: Placemaking and the Negotiation of Visibility Across Diaspora and Homeland

ABSTRACT This article examines Alevi spatial politics by analysing how space is produced, practised and negotiated across diaspora and homeland. Drawing on multi‐sited ethnographic research conducted among British Alevis in London and in Alevi villages in the Afşin–Elbistan region of Turkey, it focuses on cemevis ( cem houses) as key sites of religious placemaking. Rather than treating cemevis as fixed religious institutions or understanding spatial change as a linear outcome of migration, the article approaches them as contested and transnationally constituted spaces through which Alevi identity is publicly articulated and reworked. The London Cemevi serves as the primary empirical anchor, enabling an in‐depth examination of how diasporic Alevis negotiate visibility, legitimacy and authority through religious placemaking. The discussion then extends to migrant‐funded village cemevis in the homeland, examining them as a transnational rescaling of these spatial dynamics. By tracing practices, resources and ideas across borders, the article highlights the bidirectional circulation through which diaspora and homeland continually shape one another. The article argues that Alevi spatial politics operates through the production of visibility via cemevis , which function as transnationally constituted and internally contested spaces. Across diaspora and homeland, cemevis mediate struggles over recognition and authority, revealing visibility as an ongoing political process shaped by historical trajectories and contemporary transnational engagements. By foregrounding negotiation, contestation and circulation, the article offers a relational account of how space becomes politically consequential for a historically marginalised religious community.