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  • Recent Developments in the Study of the Armenian Genocide
  • Robert Melson
A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek, and Norman Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), xxii + 434 pp., hardcover $34.95, e-book available.
The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History, Raymond Kévorkian (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011) (translation of Le Génocide des Arméniens [Paris: Odile Jacob], 2006), viii + 1029 pp., hardcover $80.00.
The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950, Uğur Ümit Üngör (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), xviii + 303 pp., hardcover $125.00, paperback $45.00, e-book available.
Judgment at Istanbul: The Armenian Genocide Trials, Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akçam (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011) xii + 363 pp., hardcover $110.00.

The Armenian Genocide: Conspiracy or Cumulative Radicalization?

In recent years, as Turkey has become somewhat more liberal, a space has opened for some intellectuals and academics to rethink the events of 1915-1918 and the destruction or expulsion of the Armenians and other Christians of the Ottoman Empire. This should not be taken to imply that the Turkish state has ceased to deny the Armenian Genocide. Famously, Nobel-Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk stated in 2005 that "a million Armenians were killed in these lands" (Suny, p. 8). For this breach of the Turkish consensus on the denial of the genocide, Pamuk was put on trial.1

In 2000 a group of scholars, among them Turks and Muslims, began to meet in two important international and interdisciplinary groups devoted to the study of the Armenian Genocide and the last phases of the Ottoman Empire. The Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Studies (WATS), organized by Ronald Suny, Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, and his colleagues Fatma Müge Göçek and Gerard Libaridian, first convened in 2000 at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago.2 The Sawyer Seminar on [End Page 313] Mass Killing, organized by Norman Naimark, Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of East European Studies at Stanford University, first met in 2001 at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CABS). WATS continues to meet, while the CABS group ended its activities in 2007.

While they take issue with Turkey's continuing denial of the Armenian Genocide, Suny, Göçek, Libaridian, Naimark, and other scholars also argue that both Armenian and Turkish nationalist narratives undermine a shared understanding of the events. An earlier line of thinking, articulated by Vahakn N. Dadrian and Peter Balakian, among others, emphasized the prewar intentions and the radical Pan-Turkish ideology of the perpetrators—especially those of Young Turk leaders such as Mehmet Talaat (Talaat Pasha), Ismail Enver (Enver Pasha), Ahmed Cemal (Cemal Pasha), and Ziya Gökalp.3 This interpretation stresses Islam and Ottoman culture as crucial factors in the dehumanization of the Armenian millet (religious community) prior to the genocide of 1915. These scholars point to evidence that the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)—the party of Young Turks that governed the Ottoman Empire from 1908 to 1918—conspired to destroy the hated Armenians even before World War I began. They view the war as a context, not a cause of the violence.

In stark contrast, a nationalist Turkish version of the events—which Suny and I have called "the Provocation Thesis"—argues that while the Ottoman state had been tolerant of minorities, even before World War I Armenians had formed nationalist parties that sought self-determination and secession (Suny, p. 24).4 Since the Armenians lived in Turkey's heartland, Armenian self-determination threatened the state's very existence. Once the war broke out, Armenian irregulars in the eastern parts of Anatolia joined the Russians in attacking Turkey. Turkish nationalists contend that this threat led to the Young Turk leadership's decision to deport the Armenian population from Turkey. Many Armenians died during the expulsion due to wartime shortages and confusion—as did millions of Turks—but there had never been a decision to exterminate the Armenians as a group. Hence...

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