The Catholicos of All Armenians is elected by a National Ecclesiastical Assembly, a body of clergy and lay delegates drawn not only from Armenia itself but from Armenian communities across the global diaspora, a structure reflecting the reality that the majority of Armenians have lived outside Armenia's borders for much of the modern era, particularly following the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1917 under the Ottoman Empire, which killed an estimated one to one and a half million Armenians and scattered survivors across the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.
A second, jurisdictionally distinct Catholicosate exists at Cilicia, now seated at Antelias near Beirut, Lebanon, tracing its own continuous line to a medieval Armenian kingdom in Cilicia, in present-day southern Turkey; the split reflects historical political geography rather than a live succession dispute, and the two Catholicosates recognize each other and coordinate on matters of shared doctrine and liturgy while each governs its own jurisdiction, primarily Middle Eastern and diaspora communities for Cilicia and Armenia proper plus most of the wider diaspora for Etchmiadzin.
Two further sees carry the Catholicos title within Armenian Christianity without claiming the primacy of All Armenians: the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople hold patriarchal rather than catholicosal rank and administer specific historic communities rather than the church as a whole. Both defer to Etchmiadzin on questions of doctrine, underscoring that the Armenian Apostolic Church's several senior sees form a single communion with distributed administrative seats rather than several competing claims to the same office.