Dr Umit Cetin is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Westminster. He obtained his PhD from the University of Essex with his research on Suicide amongst the Alevi Kurds in the UK. Since 2010, he has been working with the British Alevi Federation to help raise the profile of the Alevi Community and tackle youth related problems and has published his research on Alevi youth, suicide, religion, identity and migration.

Alevis migrated from Turkey to the UK and settled down in London in the 1980s. From 2000s onwards, second generation young male suicides has been one of the biggest public issues for the community. Based on ethnographic data, this presentation aims to provide a sociological explanation of the social causation of these suicides in the UK Alevi community. I argue that an understanding of suicide among Alevi men requires an intersectional analysis of the social organisation of the Alevi community, taking account of their migration contexts on a transnational level and pressures of settlement, generation, masculinity and belonging within and external to the community. This problem first manifested in the form of second-generation young men and the community took steps to address the marginalisation of Alevi youth through introducing lessons about Alevism into the RE curriculum at schools. This raised the visibility of Alevi youth and contributed to a sense of belonging in schools but recently suicide has also materialised amongst the first-generation Alevi men too raising further questions about the pressures of change within the community and the impact of age and masculinity, which I will explore further in this presentation.