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Norms, Narratives, and Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2015

Jennifer M. Dixon
Jennifer M. Dixon*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Villanova University, Villanova, Pa.; e-mail: Jennifer.m.dixon@villanova.edu
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Extract

Analyzing the politics of the past in the context of the Armenian Genocide reveals an evolving interplay between international norms, official narratives, and broader discourses. This short essay explores three aspects of these interrelationships. First, I draw on my own research to highlight the ways in which changes in Turkey's narrative of the genocide—typically referred to in official discourse as sözde Ermeni sorunu (the so-called Armenian question), or more recently as 1915 olayları (the events of 1915)—have to some extent paralleled shifts in the meaning and salience of the norm against genocide. Second, I note key ways in which the Turkish state's official discourse has shaped public understandings—within and, to a lesser extent, outside Turkey—of the nature of the violence against Ottoman Armenians. Third, I suggest that in influencing public understandings of the relationship between this event and the concept of genocide, Turkey's official narrative has the potential to affect understandings of the meaning of genocide more generally.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , November 2015 , pp. 796 - 800
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank Taner Akçam, Ayhan Aktar, Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Lerna Ekmekçioğlu, Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Uğur Ümit Üngör, Keith David Watenpaugh, and the IJMES editors for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

1 Norms are defined as “collective expectations for the proper behavior of actors with a given identity.” See Katzenstein, Peter J., “Introduction: Alternative Perspectives on National Security,” in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Katzenstein, Peter J. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5Google Scholar.

2 Dixon, Jennifer M., “Defending the Nation?: Maintaining Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide,” South European Society and Politics 15 (2010): 467–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dixon, “Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide: Change within Continuity,” in Le Génocide des Arméniens: Cent ans de recherche 1915–2015, ed. Becker, Annette et al. (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015), 249–56Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Bobelian, Michael, Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long Struggle for Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 132Google Scholar.

4 On Armenians' use of the term “genocide,” see Mouradian, Khatchig, “From Yeghern to Genocide: Armenian Newspapers, Raphael Lemkin, and the Road to the UN Genocide Convention,” Haigazian Armenological Review 29 (2009): 133Google Scholar.

5 For an example of the argument that genocide is a legal concept, see Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Turkey, “Presentation by Ambassador Gündüz Aktan at the House Committee on International Relations on September 14, 2000,” accessed 2 June 2015, http://www.mfa.gov.tr/presentation-by-ambassador-gunduz-aktan-at-the-house-committee-on-international-relations-on-september-14_-2000_.en.mfa.

6 Akçam, Taner, The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), xxixGoogle Scholar. For work that emphasizes the similarities between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, see Dadrian, Vahakn N., “The Common Features of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Comparative Victimological Perspective,” in Victimology: A New Focus, vol. 4, ed. Drapkin, Israel and Viano, Emilio (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1973), 99–120Google Scholar; Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 1995)Google Scholar; and Balakian, Peter, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2003)Google Scholar.

7 On economic expropriation, see Kaiser, Hilmar, “Armenian Property, Ottoman Law and Nationality Policies during the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1916,” in The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Farschid, Olaf, Kropp, Manfred, and Dähne, Stephan (Beirut: Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2006), 49–71Google Scholar; Der Matossian, Bedross, “The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of Armenian Capital at the End of the Ottoman Empire,” European Journal of Turkish Studies (2011), accessed 29 May 2015, http://ejts.revues.org/4411Google Scholar; Üngör, Uğur Ümit and Polatel, Mehmet, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London and New York: Continuum, 2011)Google Scholar; and Akçam, Taner and Kurt, Ümit, The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015)Google Scholar. On demographic engineering, see Şeker, Nesim, “Demographic Engineering in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Armenians,” Middle Eastern Studies 43 (2007): 461–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dündar, Fuat, Modern Türkiye'nin Şifresi: İttihat ve Terakki'nin Etnisite Mühendisliği (1913–1918) (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2008)Google Scholar; and Üngör, Uğur Ümit, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 On gendered aspects of the genocide, see Sarafian, Ara, “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide,” in In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, ed. Bartov, Omer and Mack, Phyllis (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 209–21Google Scholar; Derderian, Katherine, “Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19 (2005): 1–25Google Scholar; Bjørnlund, Matthias, “‘A Fate Worse than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe's Twentieth Century, ed. Herzog, Dagmar (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 16–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna, “A Climate for Abduction, a Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (2013): 522–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and David Watenpaugh, Keith, “‘Are There any Children for Sale?’: Genocide and the Transfer of Armenian Children (1915–1922),” Journal of Human Rights 12 (2013): 283–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 For evidence of this, see Necef, Mehmet, “The Turkish Media Debate on the Armenian Massacre,” in Genocide: Cases, Comparisons and Contemporary Debates, ed. Jensen, Steven L. B. (Copenhagen: The Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2003), 225–62Google Scholar; Bayraktar, Seyhan, Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den Armeniermord in der Türkei zwischen Nationalismus und Europäisierung (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2010)Google Scholar; Erbal, Ayda, “Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the ‘Apology’ of Turkish Intellectuals,” in Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Schwelling, Birgit (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 51–94Google Scholar; and Bakiner, Onur, “Is Turkey Coming to Terms with Its Past? Politics of Memory and Majoritarian Conservatism,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41 (2013): 691–708CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 For example, see Aktar, Cengiz, “Soykırım Ötesi Büyük Felaket,” Radikal (2009), accessed 10 June 2015, http://www.radikal.com.tr/radikal2/soykirim_otesi_buyuk_felaket-933179Google Scholar; Temelkuran, Ece, Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide (New York: Verso, 2010)Google Scholar; and de Waal, Thomas, Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar. For an example of the effects of the state's framing of “genocide” as a legal concept, see Can Dağlıoğlu, Emre, “‘1915’ in Tümüyle Tarihçilere Bırakılması Anlamlı Değil,” Agos, 18 April 2015, accessed 12 June 2015, http://www.agos.com.tr/tr/yazi/11319/1915in-tumuyle-tarihcilere-birakilmasi-anlamli-degilGoogle Scholar.

11 On the escalation of violence, see Bloxham, Donald, “The Armenian Genocide of 1915–1916: Cumulative Radicalization and the Development of a Destruction Policy,” Past & Present 181 (2003): 141–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On “righteous” individuals, see Göçek, Fatma Müge, “In Search of Just Turks in the Collective Violence Committed against the Armenians,” in The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 223–40Google Scholar. On the “micropolitics” of violence, see Kaiser, “‘A Scene from the Inferno:’ The Armenians of Erzerum and the Genocide, 1915–1916,” in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, ed. Kieser, Hans-Lukas and Schaller, Dominik J. (Zürich: Chronos, 2002), 129–86Google Scholar; and Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey. On the victimization of other non-Muslim groups, see Gaunt, David, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, N.J.: Gorgias Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Bjørnlund, Matthias, “The 1914 Cleansing of Aegean Greeks as a Case of Violent Turkification,” Journal of Genocide Research 10 (2008): 41–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schaller, Dominik J. and Zimmerer, Jürgen, ed., Late Ottoman Genocides: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar.