The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, Politics and History
... The research contributes to the scholarship on the perception of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, which successfully analyzed important aspects and proponents of the official stance in Turkish politics (Adak 2015;Adar 2018;Bayraktar 2015;Çevik 2024;Dixon 2010a;Gürpınar 2016;Seckinelgin 2023;Suciyan 2016). This article adds to the academic literature by providing the first investigation into the perceptions of people in Turkey regarding the Armenian genocide as expressed online. ...
... This was manifested in the 1931 edition of the Citizenship Education textbook, an integral component of the official educational curriculum formulated by the Turkish Ministry of Education, which labeled non-Muslims as bad people (Ekmekçioğlu 2014). In parallel, the Turkish state closely monitored and censored Armenian publications during the early Republican period, and this apprehensive stance towards Armenians was further fueled by the Armenian territorial claims against Turkey presented at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 (Suciyan 2016). Moreover, Armenians were among the victims of exclusionary state policies and xenophobia against non-Muslims, such as the Wealth Tax of 1942 and the September 6-7 Pogrom in 1955. ...
The international recognition of the Armenian genocide is the most prominent issue shaping Turkish-Armenian relations today. Nevertheless, the academic literature lacks empirical analyses of people's perceptions of the genocide in Turkey. To address the gap, the article provides an exploratory investigation into people's online comments regarding the genocide on the most popular Turkish forum website, Eksisozluk. Guided by Cohen's (2001) theoretical approach, the study explores online entries on the topic spanning from 2002 to 2018 (N = 2127). The findings reveal eleven attitudes that individuals adopt in the debate. The article examines the diversity in responses by utilizing Cohen's typology, which helps to define and categorize individuals' rationales for denial. Further, it shows that Cohen's approach could contribute to explaining non-denying responses to the recollection of past suffering. The study concludes that people do not uniformly follow the official line concerning the Armenian genocide in Turkey.
... Conscious that the interaction may turn sour any moment, this is a defensive strategy primarily aimed at protecting one's own face but also that of the other's (Goffman, 1963). As the individual manages risk "by dividing the world into a large group to whom he tells nothing, and a small group to whom he tells all and upon whose help he then relies" (Goffman, 1963, p. 95), so does double naming becomes part of managing information (Ekmekçioğlu, 2016;Suciyan, 2017). As B., a woman in her fifties who was raised in Istanbul, told me: B.'s changing her name is part of what Goffman calls the "avoidance process." ...
... Over the course of the 20th century and up until the present time, multiple provisions of the Treaty were contravened numerous times. For the Turkish state's treatment of its Armenian citizens see for example Göçek (2015), Suciyan (2017), Aktar (2006) and Turan and Öztan (2018). ...
This article examines how Armenian citizens of Turkey employ names and naming strategies in their everyday life in order to navigate a nationalist social landscape. Studies of nationalist politics in everyday life have been particularly successful in demonstrating how nationalism is experienced and reproduced through the consumption of national symbols and rituals. What remains relatively glossed over in these accounts are the individuals’ constant and dynamic engagements with nationalist politics not only through national symbols and rituals but also through everyday social practices with fellow citizens. The present study seeks to capture and analyze this latter, relatively understudied, aspect. In doing so, the discussion reveals how individuals use different name strategies in order to fend off shame and humiliation as well as inhibit threats to status advancement. Overall, the following narrative moves beyond a demonstration of the functionality of nationalism as a source of unity and solidarity. Instead, it reveals the ways in which nationalist politics and minorities’ responses align, diverge and/or conflict on the ground.
... Academic studies on the non-Muslim minorities in Turkey have uncovered exclusionary practices (Aktürk 2009;Bali 2001Bali , 2004Göl 2005;Toktas 2005). Suciyan (2016) states that the Armenian community is silenced and repressed. Indeed, the Armenian case is replete with conflicts and hostility, kept alive by various political tensions, such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan (Dixon 2010;Ozturk-Tuncel and Celikpala 2019). ...
... Indeed, the Armenian case is replete with conflicts and hostility, kept alive by various political tensions, such as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan (Dixon 2010;Ozturk-Tuncel and Celikpala 2019). Although some studies provide valuable insights from the experience of the Armenian minority in modern Turkey (Ekmekçioğlu 2016;Suciyan 2016), the academic literature often focuses on specific events, predominantly the historical debates about the international recognition of the genocide label (Açar and Rüma 2007;Avedian 2013;Bilali 2013;Gürpınar 2016). The scholarship could benefit from a theoretical perspective, which would provide a generic explanation of the negative perception in question and outline the shared factors behind it in different periods. ...
This paper scrutinizes the role of Turkish politicians’ threat perception on negative descriptions of Armenians between 1960 and 1980. In so doing, it brings together the theoretical insights of group position theory with the scholarship on the perception of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey. Building on a comprehensive, mixed-method content analysis of Turkish parliamentary proceedings, it demonstrates that Turkish politicians are more likely to make negative comments about Armenians while debating about national security and foreign threats than when speaking about other topics. The paper concludes that perceived threats contribute to the negative descriptions of Armenians in Turkish politics.
... The studies on the Turkification of capital and skilled labor during the early decades of the Republic emphasize the elimination of Ottoman minorities from the businesses, the imposition of measures to discourage non-Muslims from establishing enterprises and performing their skills, as well as the exile of non-Muslim capital and labor from the country (Aktar, 1998(Aktar, , 2000(Aktar, , 2009(Aktar, , 2021Koraltürk, 2011). Additionally, studies regarding the violence and injustices experienced by the Armenian Diaspora within the state-orchestrated denial habitus also demonstrate the impact of these policies, continuity of genocidal strategies, and denial on the daily lives of surviving Armenians (Marashlian, 1999;Suciyan, 2016). ...
... Et les élites des différents groupes religieux rivalisent pour construire hôpitaux, écoles, clubs, églises et synagogues dès que la législation le permet, dans une sorte de nationalisme des petites patries 40 . Quelques exemples : au centre de l'Empire, la communauté arménienne d'Istanbul connaît une belle vitalité au xix e siècle, avec ses hôpitaux, ses églises, ses écoles, et une production intellectuelle qui s'exprime dans des journaux, des périodiques et des livres 41 Soit le cas de l'Égypte. Najat Abdulhaq mesure, pour ce pays, la place considérable que les Grecs et les juifs occupent dans l'économie, mais aussi dans la vie culturelle et politique du pays de la seconde moitié du xix e siècle au règne de Nasser 45 . ...
... Kesmek, the Turkish verb used by the member of the crew that translates as "to cut" in English, resonates in many ways with the massacres of the Armenian Genocide. As Talin Suciyan (2015) has suggested, Turkey is a "denialist habitus" in which denial of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 defines taboos and a firm line between what is and is not socially and historically acceptable, and constantly reminds citizens how they are expected to read history. This situation has significant consequences for my informants, as they cannot publicly talk about the Genocide otherwise. ...
In Istanbul, a city that is undeniably shaped by bodies of water, boats constitute ethnographic sites to observe the multiple processes of community-making. By looking at the time travelled on boats en route to the famous Prince’s Islands Archipelago located off the city proper, this article demonstrates how different understandings of time and temporality among the permanent (both winter- and summer-time) and the temporary (summer-time only) residents of the islands both define and inform particular relationships to the islands. For instance, to what extent everyday practices of accommodating time – such as waiting for boats and anticipation of delays – reflect different ways of belonging to the islands? In relation to the very specific demographic compositions and public imaginations about these islands as a non-Turkish/Muslim space populated by Jews, Greeks and Armenians, this article necessarily investigates how accessibility to urban mobility plays out in the (un)making of national unity. In doing so, it follows a specific approach to understanding noise, sound and hearing as ethnographic data, and tackles the ways through which non-Muslim difference and diversity are expressed (and/or similarly silenced) in the city. This is how the article provides an ethnographically thick description of the “stigmatization” of these islands in Turkish national and public imagery by way of focusing on the tangible aspects of (spending) time which is often sensed as discriminatory by the islanders.
The Armenian genocide and its denial is the element by which one can best define the “spirit” of the Republic of Turkey. The living and permanent spectre of a terrible crime against humanity, and the fact that the perpetrators went unpunished (that they “got away with it”), shaped the future role of communities as a code of (un)ethics in society. In this framework, the Muslim Turks re-established their status as the “ruling nation” (colonisers) of the country, while the “indigenous peoples”—Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and others—were massacred, expelled from their homes, forced to leave the country, dispossessed of their property, or remained as unequal and unwanted citizens of the new republic, constantly victimised by denial. This chapter discusses how the last hundred years of post-genocide republican history are full of re-enacted moments of structural violence against non-Muslims and non-Turks, both in deceptively peaceful times and when routine relations break down during massacres and pogroms. In four subsections—the hostage situation, dystopic state surveillance, palimpsests of violence, and anticipated catastrophe—the chapter addresses the legacies of genocide and denial in Turkish Republican history through a non-exhaustive overview of both historical and contemporary cases.
This chapter examines the Armenian Genocide through the framework of transitional justice, with a particular focus on truth recovery mechanisms. Despite substantial historical evidence, the Republic of Turkey has persistently denied the Genocide, engaging in state-sponsored efforts to minimise and rationalise the atrocities. This denial has hindered reconciliation and reflects complex historical and political dynamics. Addressing the Armenian Genocide through transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions, historical commissions, and parliamentary commissions, is crucial for confronting these historical injustices. However, given the strong denialism and authoritarian regime in Turkey, comprehensive reconciliation efforts face significant challenges. Persistent civil society mobilisation, grassroots activism, and international pressure are essential to advance these efforts. Engaging a wide range of actors, including civil society, scholars, and political parties, is vital for the legitimacy and effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms.
Over the past 2 decades, the topic of Christian‐Muslim relations has become one of the most talked‐about issues in the world, and western Christian historical experiences and sources have usually dominated these discussions. Often overlooked is the fact that vast numbers of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christians and Muslims have continuously lived among one another from the beginning of Islam in the seventh century up to the present day. This article asserts that a broad analysis of Orthodox Christian‐Muslim relations as a distinct history can reveal insights into the nature of interfaith relationships across time and geographical or linguistic boundaries, highlighting lasting and profound human experiences such as solidarity, spiritual fellowship, traumatic memory, and resistance against injustice. This article will both introduce readers to the key scholarly literature that discusses aspects of this distinct history, and also put these sources into dialog in order to propose ways of approaching this history as a coherent field of study. Specifically, this article argues that theologies of sacred power have structured Orthodox‐Christian Muslim relations across time and space. These theologies are here termed “imperial theologies of sacred power,” and “vernacular theologies of sacred power.” “Imperial theologies of sacred power” refer to the political theological claims that both Orthodox Christian and Muslims empires made to justify their dominance over the other's religious communities as imperial subjects. “Vernacular theologies of sacred power” refers to the relationships that were constructed between members of these communities at the local level when they actively shared sacred spaces and rituals. The concept of “vernacular theologies” is taken from recent theoretical work in Orthodox Christian Studies by Lydia Bringerud (2019), Sarah Riccardi‐Swartz (2020), and Helena Kupari and Elini Vuola (2020) and provides a helpful way forward for the further exploration of the historical contours of interfaith relations in Orthodox Christian contexts.
Despite their long-lasting work in Armenia and Turkey, peacebuilding practitioners of civil society have an ambivalent relationship with the term peace and refrain from defining their role as peacebuilders. Informed by the anthropological research adopting the local turn in peace and conflict studies, we explore how civil society practitioners in Armenia and Turkey perceive the concept of “peace” ( խաղաղություն or khaghaghutyun in Armenian and barış in Turkish) and how they position themselves regarding the meanings they attach to this term. In this paper, we present data collected through semi-structured interviews with civil society practitioners from both countries, investigating the perceptions and practices in the aftermath of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. We found that the flexibility of the term normalization in comparison to peacebuilding is preferred among civil society practitioners working for the Armenia-Turkey dialogue. We also show that the political context shapes local meanings of the word peace. While in Turkey, the authoritarian regime, restrictions on NGO s, and rise of ultranationalism make open advocacy for peace with Armenia difficult and risky, the war with Azerbaijan firmly structures where and how the word peace can be used in Armenia – even though it is not clear what is meant by it in either case. Finally, our research points out a neglected aspect of professionalism in this context and shows how it requires emotional labor to suppress enthusiasm and hope for peace. We close our paper with a call for further research among the youth and exploration of effective communication, alternative approaches, and terminologies that can foster meaningful dialogue and reconciliation without provoking divisive sentiments.
Armenian Apostolic Christians in Istanbul implicitly assert their “right to the city” through the liturgical itinerary that moves around the megalopolis of Istanbul. Though the right to the city has been taken up in a plethora of ways, its applicability to religion and religious practices is underexplored. While many Armenians in the Republic of Turkey explicitly take up the language of rights, the urban liturgical movements described in this article do not sit easily with either ideas of universal human rights or the minority rights framework operative in the Republic of Turkey. The concept of the right to the city, which already sits at the limits of conventional notions of rights, helps articulate how these religious practices claim an urban minority presence. By considering Armenian Christian liturgical practice in Istanbul simultaneously as “stational liturgy” and as a claim to the “right to the city,” this article offers an ethnographic account of urban minority presence‐making that encounters the legal strictures of rights discourse without being fully enmeshed in them. In so doing, the article uses the ethnography to make a broader argument about the limits of rights discourse to account fully for forms of presence‐making that are grounded in minority traditions.
Ernest Hemingway arrived in Istanbul on 30 September 1922 to cover the end of the Greek–Turkish War for the Toronto Star. From late October to mid-November 1922, Hemingway wrote 20 articles about the last days of the war and the re-constellation of political legitimacy in the region. There are four distinguishing features of Hemingway’s reports from Constantinople. First, they provided an eloquent depiction of the city, suggesting the charm and squalor of old ‘Constan’ for the young writer. The second was a clear expectation of a ‘second disaster’, which was assumed to be a replica of Smyrna. Hemingway clearly observed the fears of non-Muslims and foreigners in the city, who were panicking over possible new massacres and pillage. Third, Hemingway quickly realized that the exodus of people – the desperate flight of Christian refugees – and Turkification of the country would be his main subject. His repeated emphasis on refugees permanent loss of a home is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s famous essay ‘We Refugees’, as well as a precursor to Agamben’s point that refugees are reduced to ‘bare life’. Lastly, his prose relied on irony and cynicism, as a cover for his disappointment and shame for humanity and modern civilization. Juxtaposing his writing with contemporary local accounts, I intend to situate his witnessing into the larger historiography of ‘Armistice Istanbul’ and the homogenization policies of the winning Turkish nationalist leadership. Hemingway’s critique of (homogeneous) nation-state formation after the war and the favourable involvement of the Allied countries and humanitarian agencies in the mass production of refugees was quite exceptional and ahead of his times.
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.
This article offers an analysis of documentaries made in Turkey in the 2010s, which follows the homecoming journey of their Armenian character to the lands of their ancestors. It studies, on the one hand, the way in which they reveal the specific bond that each maintains with these lands haunted by the memory of the genocide, by focusing on the preservation and (re)construction of identity during the post-genocide period and by collecting in the respective regions the persistent fragments of individual or collective memories. It also examines how these documentaries oppose the official history of a negationist Turkey to the individual stories of (the family of) their characters, condemned to silence or oblivion. It finally discusses the possibility of reviving the collective memory through these documentaries.
The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918 and on the morning of 13 November 1918, a mighty fleet of battleships from Britain, France, Italy and Greece sailed to Istanbul, and dropped anchor without encountering resistance. This day marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire, a dissolution that would bring great suffering and chaos, but also new opportunities for all Ottomans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Drawing upon a previously untouched collection of Armenian and Ottoman Turkish primary sources, Ari Şekeryan considers these understudied post-war years. Examining the Armenian community as they emerged from the aftermath of war and genocide, Şekeryan outlines their shifting political position and the strategies they used to survive this turbulent period. By focusing on the Ottoman Armistice (1918–1923), Şekeryan illuminates an oft-neglected period in history, and develops a new case study for understanding the political reactions of ethnic groups to the fall of empires and nation-states.
Armenians of Turkey have recently been applying for citizenship in Armenia in growing numbers. Based on research in Istanbul and Yerevan, we examine the contextual developments in both countries that contributed to the emergence of this practice, the motivations that Armenian citizenship applicants are guided by, and the implications of the process on their feelings and expressions of belonging. This move of many Armenians of Turkey appears to be mostly a strategic choice motivated by recent developments in the two countries (2015-2020). The Armenian passport is seen as a tool that could enable mobility from increasingly precarious Turkey. However, our analysis also reveals dimensions and implications of this praxis that transcend mere instrumentalism and relate to affective realms of belonging. To some of its holders, the newly acquired Armenian citizenship represents an opportunity or hope for a fully recognised belonging, in contrast to their traditional step-citizenship in Turkey.
The assassination of Talat Pasha by Soghomon Tehlirian on 15 March 1921 in Berlin, as well as Tehlirian’s trial and acquittal on 2–3 June 1921, have contributed to the formation of conflicting legacies of the Armenian Genocide. Though minuscule in terms of violence and legal ramifications, these events and their reimagination in contentious narratives have shaped a dominant prism of sensemaking in Turkish-Armenian relations. In the imagination of rival groups, Talat and Tehlirian compete for the very same normative categories of hero and victim at once and each are demonized as a villain and perpetrator. Moreover, it is each figure’s embodiment of martyrdom and revenge that explains why their heroizations have proved so enduring and effective across time and space. This mutual framework of sensemaking, which I call the Talat-Tehlirian complex, ultimately denies the chances of historical reconciliation. In terms of its theoretical implications, this case study explains how a martyr-avenger complex can continuously demand solidarity, sustain grievances, and sacralize violence in post-conflict societies. Based on a thick description of what happened in Berlin in 1921 and its contentious narratives across different generations, this paper calls for a transition to a post-heroic age in Turkish-Armenian relations.
Through a consideration of three film works—Ravished Armenia/Auction of Souls (1919), Testimony (2007), and Remembering (2019), which all represent the testimonies of Armenian women to form truths of the catastrophe—this article problematizes how such portrayals might, contrary to their best intentions, resonate with the logic of genocide. By discussing specific woman figures in the three works, published at three times in the postgenocidal era—one just after the events, the other two recently—this article aims not only to mark the evolution of the representational regime with which the Armenian woman is surrounded but also to show that this phenomenon is a key component in a transformation of the lexicon developed around the recognition politics, which ought to involve something other than feverishly chasing a representation of the events of 1915–17 and using women’s witness narratives to this end.
The book series, edited by Nicoletta Pesaro and sponsored by the Department of Asian and North African Studies, aims to give voice to a time-honoured branch of theoretical and practical research across the disciplines and research domains within the Department. The series aims to establish a platform for scholarly discussion and a space for international dialogue on the translation of Asian and North African languages. In doing so, the project aims to observe and verify the translingual and transcultural dynamics triggered by translation from and into said ‘languages-cultures’, as well as to identify and explore the deep cultural mechanisms and structures involved in interethnic behaviours and relationships. Translation is also a major research tool in the humanities. As a matter of fact, a hermeneutic potential in terms of cultural mediation is inherent in translation activities and in the reflection on translation: it is precisely this potential that allows scholars, in both their research and dissemination work, to bring to the surface the interethnic and intercultural dynamics regulating the relationships between civilisations, both diachronically and synchronically. The project is a continuation and a development of the research carried out in recent years by the former Department of East Asian Studies – now Department of Asian and North African Studies – of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice through a series of initiatives organised by the research group on the translation of Asian languages “Laboratorio sulla Traduzione delle Lingue orientali” ( Laboratori sulle lingue orientali ). Such activities involved periodical meetings on translation, whose objective was to introduce and discuss specific issues in translation from and into Asian languages, as well as several international events (workshops, conferences, and symposia).
The book series, edited by Nicoletta Pesaro and sponsored by the Department of Asian and North African Studies, aims to give voice to a time-honoured branch of theoretical and practical research across the disciplines and research domains within the Department. The series aims to establish a platform for scholarly discussion and a space for international dialogue on the translation of Asian and North African languages. In doing so, the project aims to observe and verify the translingual and transcultural dynamics triggered by translation from and into said ‘languages-cultures’, as well as to identify and explore the deep cultural mechanisms and structures involved in interethnic behaviours and relationships. Translation is also a major research tool in the humanities. As a matter of fact, a hermeneutic potential in terms of cultural mediation is inherent in translation activities and in the reflection on translation: it is precisely this potential that allows scholars, in both their research and dissemination work, to bring to the surface the interethnic and intercultural dynamics regulating the relationships between civilisations, both diachronically and synchronically. The project is a continuation and a development of the research carried out in recent years by the former Department of East Asian Studies – now Department of Asian and North African Studies – of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice through a series of initiatives organised by the research group on the translation of Asian languages “Laboratorio sulla Traduzione delle Lingue orientali” ( Laboratori sulle lingue orientali ). Such activities involved periodical meetings on translation, whose objective was to introduce and discuss specific issues in translation from and into Asian languages, as well as several international events (workshops, conferences, and symposia).
In ihrem Artikel setzt sich Talin Suciyan mit den problematischen Aspekten der Debatte über die Anerkennung bzw. Leugnung des Genozids an den ArmenierInnen in Deutschland auseinander. Um die darin evidenten Relativierungen, die Nivellierungen von Opfern und TäterInnen, zu zeigen, diskutiert und analysiert sie die Inhalte der Veranstaltungen, das sind Tagungen, Konferenzen und Filmvorführungen, die anlässlich des 100. Gedenkjahres des Genozids im Jahr 2015 in Deutschland stattgefunden haben. In diesem Kontext erörtert sie ferner kritisch die vom Bundestag im Juni 2016 angenommene Resolution. Darüber hinaus, weist Suciyan darauf hin, dass auch Deutschland ein Land für die Nachkommen von Überlebenden des Genozids an den ArmenierInnen war und ist, und dass die Angehörigen nachfolgender Generationen von Überlebenden nach wie vor tagtäglich mit der systematischen Gewalt der Leugnung konfrontiert sind. Der Beitrag zeigt somit auf, dass sich die hier rekonstruierten Logiken der Leugnung – bewusst oder unbewusst –, grundsätzlich auch in Deutschland, im Land der offiziellen Anerkennung des Holocausts, in vielen Bereichen – und dabei nicht zuletzt auf wissenschaftlichen Tagungen und Konferenzen, bei Gedenkveranstaltungen sowie in der Resolution – reproduziert haben.
This chapter aims to portray the Armenian community from the establishment of the Turkish Republic through to the victory of the pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002. This chapter covers the changing strategies and identity politics employed against Armenians between 1923 and 2002, emphasizing how Armenians as minorities have been perceived as second-class by the Turkish state throughout the twentieth century.
This paper investigates how and why Alevis in Turkey have insisted that they are not a minority community and have been reluctant to formulate their religio-cultural demands in the framework of minority rights, thereby challenging what is often called liberal multiculturalism. Inquiring into the type of minority community Alevis form, alongside Turkey’s minority rights history, it explains why the case of Alevis necessitates a certain revaluation of liberal multiculturalism, as well as a reformulation of group-specific minority rights. We argue that the liberal multiculturalist understanding of minority rights may force minorities to lead a socially isolated and apolitical life, with no possibility to participate in a pluralistic reconstruction of the mainstream symbolic framework in society, which is contrary to the aims of Alevis in Turkey.
This chapter examines the changing politics of the AKP government from its first electoral victory in 2002 to the present and how this has affected the public, media and democracy, along with a focus on Armenians and the Armenian Question. This chapter argues that since 2002, although under Erdoğan’s leadership AKP made positive steps toward democracy in the first few years of its reign (i.e., on human rights issues, civil-military issues, the Kurdish issue, the Cyprus dispute) despite some obvious shortcomings in relation to the implementation of reforms, it has become dramatically more authoritarian over the years and, since the June elections in 2015, there has been complete chaos, with mass arrests of activists, job dismissals, jailed journalists, closure of media outlets, crackdown on social media, a regenerated war between the Turkish army and PKK guerrillas, and involvement in corruption. This chapter concludes that massacres, assassinations, the non-resolution of the Kurdish issue, the military coup attempt in July 2016, the state of emergency, lack of freedom of speech and media, and now constitutional change with one man governing a Turkey are big obstacles confronting the debate on the Armenian issue and normalization between Turkey and Armenia.
This chapter, through ethnographic research methods, aims to examine the activities and discourses of these liberal intelligentsia, the NGO community, activists and leading figures which were triggered by the assassination of Hrant Dink, through the theoretical framework of social movement and resource mobilization and its core theory to demonstrate that the struggle for the Armenians goes beyond the ethnic non-Muslim minority rights movement but plays an integral part in the struggle for democratization in Turkey overall. It argues that many Armenian, Kurdish and Turkish political organizations, LGBT groups, political figures and directors have played a role in the social movement which arose from Dink’s assassination in 2007 and still continues in different forms despite all the political turmoil, particularly since July 2016.
Recent anthropological works on the aftermath of mass violence can be studied as having generated a negative methodology. New work has addressed the gaps, voids, and hollows of knowledge production in and about sites of mass atrocity and is developing novel research practices within these schisms. While considering the (im)possibility of research as the condition of possibility (as well as the question) for anthropological (and historical) work on the long durée of mass violence, this review highlights some adverse ethnographic methods that have emerged (and have been conceptualized) in the interstices. A critical positionality vis-à-vis anthropology's positive outlook for evidentiary presences in the field has moved scholars of mass atrocity and its aftermath toward methods that would tarry in and through the negative.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 49 is October 21, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
This essay examines “professions of friendship”: efforts by populations who are targeted as enemies of the state to proclaim their historical fidelity to the state's foundation and preservation. Such declarations often reinscribe a rigid and often violently statist narrative of politics. The essay argues that the retrenchment of this narrative, when reissued in the name of friendship, does not simply close down political options. It seeks to embolden sentiments of moral obligation across instituted lines of enmity. These solicitations of friendship are burdened by a particular historical task: to envision a past and a future of social cohabitation in a present where its possibilities have been violently undermined and morally devalued. The essay centers on two instances that bookend the past century: the first was delivered in Istanbul by an organization speaking on behalf of Armenians living in territories claimed by the Turkish nationalist movement in 1922; the second was issued by a Kurdish Peace Mother in Diyarbakır, as a plea for an end to state violence in late 2015.
Since the official history-writing is a defining aspect for the formation and consolidation of nation-states, it is crucial to explore the attempts to legitimize particular discourses regarding historical atrocities. The selective representations of the past, in this regard, contradict counter-memories and propagate hegemonic patterns of remembrance and/or forgetting of past crimes. This article accordingly addresses how the representations of counter-memories as threats to national security and the silencing of gender-specific experiences and remembrances by sanctioned historical narratives become manifest in the history-making of the Turkish nation-state. By focusing on the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide as two cases of crimes against humanity, it is intended to discuss the shifting positions and roles that the Turkish state adopts in the remembering and forgetting of historical offences. The article argues that through prioritizing national security and national interests, the securitization of memory reconstructs collective traumas of distinct ethnic and religious groups on the basis of a nation-state’s perceived internal and external threats. It also claims that the competing voices of women and their distinct experiences and patterns of remembrance and forgetting past atrocities are suppressed for the sake of the preservation of national security. By incorporating the issue of gender into the debate on the securitization of memory, this article elucidates the mismatch between positions of femininity and masculinity within the official national historiography of the Turkish state.
This article analyzes the transformation of the political position of the Ottoman Armenian community by focusing on the community’s reactions vis-à-vis a major turning point in modern Turkish history: the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey. The article demonstrates how and why the Ottoman Armenian community reacted as it did when the status of the state as a Republic was proclaimed by the Grand National Assembly in October 1923. The major argument the article puts forward is that following the results of the Turkish-Armenian War in the Caucasus, the Greco-Turkish War in Western Anatolia, and the retreat of the French from the Cilicia region, the majority of the Ottoman Armenian community which remained within the borders of ‘New Turkey’ shifted its political position to accommodate the policies of the ruling power in order to protect their physical and cultural existence during this period of political turmoil. Benefiting from primary sources, including Ottoman Armenian and Ottoman Turkish newspapers, archival documents, and parliamentary minutes, this article focuses on the position of Ottoman Armenians following the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey, and thus contributes to the historiography on the Armistice period.
What can we learn from exploring the history of the questions that could not be asked, the connections that could not be made, and the research that could not be done? What are the challenges of demilitarization for society and political institutions at large, when academic research itself is shaped by layers of silence? Asking these and other questions, this article proposes “methodological militarism” as a tool to understand the deeply ingrained workings of militarism in academic knowledge production and engages in a search for the “better story” of demilitarizing academia. Since January 2016, more than 2,000 academics in Turkey have been facing the dire consequences of having signed the Academics for Peace petition asking for an end to militarized state violence and human rights violations in Turkey’s southeastern cities. Departing from this moment of rupture and focusing critically on my own scholarship, the article raises questions about the historical making of the academic cultures of militarism as well as the limits and possibilities of their unmaking. © 2018 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
This article analyses the social construction of moral outrage, interpreting it as both an extemporaneous feeling and an enduring process, objectified in narratives and rituals and permeating public spaces as well as the intimate sphere of social actors’ lives. Based on ethnography carried out in Istanbul, this contribution focuses on the assassination of the Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. This provoked a moral shock and led to an annual commemoration in which thousands of people—distant in political, religious, ethnic positions—gather around a shared feeling of outrage. The article retraces the narratives of innocence and the moral frames that make Dink’s public figure different from other victims of state violence, thus enabling a moral and emotional identification of a large audience. Outrage over Dink’s murder has become a creative, mobilizing force that fosters new relationships between national history and subjectivity, and de-reifies essentialized social boundaries and identity claims.
The centenary year of the Armenian genocide witnessed an escalation in cultural production and both political and academic focus. This paper looks at some of the sites and spaces, physical and discursive, in which the centenary was marked. In particular, it seeks to assess how the centenary has challenged and possibly altered the context within which we approach the genocide and its continuing legacies. The paper is positioned in the diasporic space – while recognizing that this is fluid and embodies transnational sites between “homelands” in the form of Armenia and Turkey, and “host states” where diaspora communities have resided (at least) since the genocide, in effect their homes. This paper attempts to pick out some of the themes apparent in the discourse and in the activities during 2015, from the perspective of Armenian diasporan actors, and is based on the author’s observations and participation in centenary events in the USA, Lebanon, Turkey, Switzerland, and the UK, as well as interviews with participants and organizers.
This article examines the treatment of Armenians by the late Ottoman and Turkish republican state with a special focus on the social and political roles of the Armenian clergy, especially the patriarch. After giving a brief account of the historical evolution of the millet system – the principles and practices applied by the Ottoman state in its treatments of non-Muslims – the article tries to understand whether the new regime kept it or adopted a modern approach during the transition from empire to nation-state. It concludes that the republican state has created a deliberate inconsistency in its treatment of the Armenian community and patriarch. Although it has avoided recognizing them as a group and their group’s rights it continuously discriminated against them because of their group identity. The republican state has tried to downgrade the patriarch to a mere religious figure without any social or political role which is defined de jure. However, it has continued to accept him as de facto leader of the Armenian community on some occasions.
This article examines the recently increasing representation of the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in modern Kurdish literature in Turkey. This recent interest is argued to be nested within the “memory wave” in Turkey, but also motivated by both the pluralist ideological underpinnings of the dominant Kurdish movements in Turkey and a robust oral history transmission within Kurdish society. The memory of the genocide is shown to appear in Kurdish novels through a number of recurring themes, such as a nostalgic past cohabitation, Islamicized Armenians, and a redemptive continuity between Armenian and Kurdish suffering in consecutive decades. The article argues that the treatment of the genocide memory in Kurdish literature contributes to a wider-scale effort of establishing a non-negationist counter-memory, but that its potential for a genuine confrontation with the past is weakened by its selective treatment of the memory whereby issues of responsibility and guilt are often avoided.
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