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Sarkis Zabunyan, one of the prominent figures in Turkish contemporary art, was selected to represent the Turkish pavilion in the Venice Biennale in 2015. Since 2015 was the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, a genocide that has not been recognized by the Turkish Republic for more than a hundred years, and Sarkis being an Istanbul Armenian born and raised in Turkey, the selection caused quite a stir and sparked a public discussion on art and collective healing when it was announced. As a result, the catalog of Sarkis's work Respiro was subjected to censorship. Through this censorship case, this article scrutinizes various reconciliation discourses developed in Turkey in the early 2000s regarding the Armenian Genocide and how contemporary art could possibly engage/disengage with those discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish support for Azerbaijan in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war has renewed long-dormant Armenian perceptions of a neighboring threat. Turkey provided direct military support that helped its ally reconquer the ethnic Armenian exclave, leading to the forced exodus of most inhabitants after a final defeat in 2023. Continuing open hostilities stalled efforts to normalize Armenian–Turkish relations and reopen the border following the 2020 war. For Armenians both in Armenia and in the diaspora, including those living in Turkey, the war prompted comparisons to the 1915 Armenian Genocide and perceptions that a historical enemy was once again actively aggressive in a region that had long been considered part of Moscow's sphere of influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centers on the life of the late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican bureaucrat Mustafa Reşat to investigate how he turned into a genocide technocrat. It examines his career and decisions at critical junctions and depicts him as an outstanding representative of a category of perpetrators who prepare the propitious infrastructure, ground, and climate for such large-scale violence as the Armenian Genocide. By shifting the perspective to the type, scale, and level of perpetrating violence, this paper sheds light on how Mustafa Reşat used his administrative and political knowledge and experience to serve Talat Pasha, who was already organizing the deportation and extermination of Armenians. Drawing upon hitherto unmined sources such as his memoirs, it demonstrates how an ultranationalist and dedicated Ottoman bureaucrat played a pivotal role in determining the main contours of the Turkish state’s mindset on the “Armenian and Kurdish Questions”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the depiction of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish textbooks and examines correlations between changes in Turkish political dynamics and their impact on these educational resources. It analyzes concepts, methodologies, and linguistic constructs used to describe the '1915 incident,' tracking their evolution from 1980 to the present. The study also considers how events like the 1980 coup d'état, rising nationalism, and the Islamization of politics influenced textbook content, alongside changes during Turkey's bid for European Union membership. Despite a stated aim of historical accuracy in these textbooks, the research hypothesizes that their content is significantly shaped by the prevailing political climate. This work provides insights into the complex relationship between politics and historical representation in educational materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research on an urban regeneration project targeting the historically Armenian quarter of a provincial capital in the Kurdish parts of Turkey, the article engages with two related, but separate strands of anthropological scholarship on the 'fragmented' nature of sovereignty to think through the relation of sovereignty and extraction. It does so, firstly, in relation to contemporary transformations of statecraft under conditions of financialised neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and secondly, in relation to the historically contingent constellation of property relations, racialisation and violence in the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation-state. The first leads me to argue that 'fragmentation' emerges here as a project internal to the practices of statecraft, that is, not primarily driven by market mechanisms, nor as something that extends beyond the nation-state. The historical account is offered as a case that further extends our scholarly archive of modern sovereignty as a global form intimately entangled with extraction and dispossession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relying on a biographical approach that reconstructs the life and work of Johannes [Hovhanness/Յովհաննէս] Jakob [Hagop/Յակոբ] Manissadjian [Manisacıyan/Մանիսաճեան] (1862–1942), a highly successful scientist at the Anatolia College (Merzifon/Marsovan/Մարզվան), who established a meteorological station and a natural history museum with an extensive collection of specimens, the paper traces the routes of disappearance, dispersal and ruination of indigenous lives, people, and knowledge within the context of the Armenian genocide. Drawing on documents from Ottoman, German, and American archives, I stress the potential of biographical methods to study the processes and structures of mass violence targeting the Ottoman Armenians, as well as to foreground the agency and subjectivity of genocide survivors. The article also focuses on post-genocide scientific (dis)engagements of Manissadjian in light of Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘after Auschwitz’ discussions and from the perspective of indigenous knowledge production. In particular, his two ‘archival acts’ in the post-genocide context, the ‘Catalogue’ of the collection of the Anatolia College Museum that he prepared as ‘the former Curator’ and his small pamphlet entitled Proverbs of Turkey, which provided an ethnographic portrait of Anatolia, were his humble acts of saving a treasure trove of knowledge that was in danger of becoming debris. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have analyzed how political actors appropriate Holocaust-related memory laws to whitewash the past and undermine democratic traditions in various European countries. However, political actors in Europe have debated several other memory laws, which far-right MPs appropriate to serve their own purposes. The recognition of the Armenian Genocide is an understudied example of this phenomenon. Drawing from data collected in four countries—Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Sweden—this analysis introduces the rhetorical strategies of memory justification and memory extrapolation to examine how far-right MPs, in very distinct geopolitical contexts, appropriate and instrumentalize Armenian Genocide memory to attack pluralism and promote their own versions of Europe. Through an analysis of the instrumentalization of the Armenian Genocide, this article examines a growing crisis at the center of contemporary European politics. This crisis, which involves actors promoting very different goals and values, increasingly threatens the socio-political cohesion of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Armenian Memory Project (AMP) is a collaborative effort designed to harness the energy and resources of the University of Connecticut and the New England Armenian community for the goal of fostering greater understanding of the region's Armenian cultural heritage and the impact human rights crimes had on the Armenian community. In 2019, students and faculty from the university worked with Armenian American institutions and individuals on an initial component of the AMP, employing digital media technology to tell the story of one immigrant Armenian family, the Dildilians. A unique course was created to produce a documentary film centring around this family's experiences in Ottoman Turkey before, during, and after the Armenian Genocide. Designed and taught by a documentary filmmaker with support from a family archivist/historian, the course brought students together in a collaborative learning experience. By immersing themselves in the family's extensive photograph archive, these students came to understand the important role that the past continues to play in the lives of present-day Armenians. Furthermore, by taking on the responsibility as storytellers of the Dildilian narrative, students developed a deeper identification with this distant history and, in a wider sense, an appreciation for the ethical value of memory in bearing witness to the past. This collaborative and participatory framework for teaching using archival collections can serve as a model for creating a transformative learning experience in the study of human rights, war, and genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intergenerational transmission of memories among descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, focusing on perspectives from both males and females. Using an oral history methodology in three provinces– Erznka (modern-day Erzincan), Malatya, and Dersim – the study investigates how narratives of the genocide have been passed down and changed within families. The research emphasizes the gender-specific tactics of the genocide, where Armenian men were often targeted for extermination, while women and children endured forced marches, sexual violence, abductions and forced marriages. By connecting with descendants who carry the post-memory of these events, the study reveals the deep and lasting impact of these atrocities on the Armenian community. Their stories unveil the intricate layers of trauma and resilience that define the Armenian experience and contribute to a broader understanding of genocide and its enduring effects on future generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second decade of the 20th century saw two pivotal events from the Middle East and South Asia: the Armenian Genocide and the Khilafat movement. Both events were influential in setting into motion a cascade of events whose repercussions are still felt acutely to this day. Simultaneous interest in these two pivotal moments has generated considerable scholarship over the last few decades. However, the prospect that these two events could be interlinked in underlying ways is a proposition that has not yet found any traction. Using a range of sources, this article attempts an initial foray into a critically understudied area: the denial and justification of the Armenian Genocide that was integral to the Khilafat movement in South Asia. Arguably one of the most potent examples of denial perpetuated by a non-perpetrator, the South Asian version of this narrative was cobbled together through a convergence of interests between the Muslim and Hindu elite in the region. Unraveling this vast network of denialism and justification warrants attention to underlying motivations and power configurations across a kaleidoscope of identities and geography – which this article seeks to uncover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the years 2013–2016, the artist İz Öztat created four distinct bodies of work, all of which engaged aspects of water. This period was marked in Turkey by the heightened tensions around the neoliberal (re)distribution of public space and public resources, which escalated in the aftermath of the Gezi Park Protests of 2013. In this article, the author argues that, beyond its immediate critique of contemporary capitalist appropriation, Öztat's engagement with water builds relations across time, space, and species to recall histories of the Armenian Genocide, challenging the denials of official historiography. By tapping into the linguistic, cultural, and material imaginaries of water, and learning from the present-day water protection movements, Öztat engages the diverse histories carried across waterways. Water becomes a nexus through which the artist locates and articulates the physical and epistemic violence of modernity, particularly as it indexes community, conscience, and ecology from the late 19th century to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the question of the possible linkages between the Gallipoli campaign and the Armenian genocide, which began in Ottoman Turkey at about the same time. A case is made for the nexus, and a large international body of work is explored to assess the scholarly support for it. The article then examines some recent publications that threaten to undermine the nexus thesis and assesses their impact. It pays particular attention to research by Taner Akçam, an important student of the genocide and one of the first scholars to emphasise Gallipoli's role in it. This research purports to shift the crucial extermination decisions by the Turkish authorities to earlier dates than previously thought, thus potentially reducing the likelihood of the Gallipoli landings being a factor in those decisions. The notion that the eight-month battle of Gallipoli played a part in maintaining, if not precipitating, the genocide is also briefly discussed. Finally, the article looks at a 2022 publication with an Australasian orientation, which promises to examine 'the entangled relationship' of Gallipoli and the Armenian genocide, and notes the curious and continuing reluctance of Australian historians to engage fully with this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about "Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures" based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a theoretical framework, and the specific case study concerning Antonia Arslan. The project originates from two concerns: the first one being the awareness of the loss of poets and writers' long-lived faith in the creative power of the artistic gesture, a widespread belief before the two world wars, and the second one consisting in a reflection on a general change of the theoretic framework of literature, especially in the case of the narration of traumatic experiences such as wars, genocides, migrations and displacements of people, which have taken place in Europe during the 20th Century [Neohelicon, 2004(1), Migratio et litterae]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In one of his lectures at Northwestern University, Eli Wiesel (1977) stressed that "if the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony." However, Wiesel suggested the generation of the Holocaust and most likely have forgotten the eyewitness survivors of the Armenian Genocide. In this article, I focus on a specific kind of testimony that emerged amongst the survivors of the Armenian Genocide: the song-testimony. Thinking about music and sound is important as the experience of genocide stretches far beyond the visual-oriented notions of such tragedy. It is in this spirit that I write this essay to investigate "Der Zor Çölünde," a series of song-testimonies that musically charts the experience of Armenians during the Genocide of 1915-1923. I primarily argue that Armenian deportees appropriated the musical and lyrical template of "Der Zor Çölünde" by creating new verses. In doing so, Armenians illustrated and immortalized what they saw, felt, and experienced during the deportations and forced marches. Considering the multifaceted nature of "Der Zor Çölünde," this essay reimagines the Armenian Genocide experience through the voice(s) of its protagonists. Furthermore, I emphasize the importance and implication of listening to the performances of "Der Zor Çölünde" against the official narratives of genocide denial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article refers to clarifying the reality of the Armenian Genocide through Syrian films, series, plays, and documentaries. The author studied in this article music and songs showed by syrians in plays such as Mamduh Adwan's "Days of hunger", and series like "Brothers of the land" etc. It is noted that by using song and music, Syrian arabs expressed their emotions and point of view toward the terrible and horrifying act of the Armenian genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the cultural memory of the Armenian genocide archived, to a major extent, in non-digitized form. In the initial decades following the genocide, the memory of the crimes committed against Armenians in 1915 was almost non-existent in the public space of America. Monuments, demonstrations, state, and international resolutions, and other instruments of memorialization did not materialize until the 1960s when, as a result of worldwide Armenian mobilization ahead of the 50th anniversary, traces of genocide remembrance were gradually brought to life. Analyzing two Armenian newspapers from the United States – Hairenik Weekly (HW) and The Armenian Mirror-Spectator (AMS) – this paper reveals how Armenians recollected the genocide in the decades preceding the emergence of subsequent lieux de mémoire. What evoked their memories before 1965? And how did narratives change over time, eventually leading to the "exteriorization of Armenian memory"? The case of the Armenian genocide shows that memories of a traumatic event can quickly penetrate the cultural sphere, but remain closed for longer in the narrow framework of a specific community. This had consequences, including an almost complete lack of representation of the genocide in the public domain – one that would be designed by Armenians for non-Armenians. The process of meaning-making (traced through editorials from the two Armenian-American newspapers) influenced a gradual bridging of the representation gap in the American public space, beginning in 1965. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian's 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian's mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an "empirical fabulist." My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman's (2008) call for "critical fabulation," and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother's ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have done a great deal to unpack the motivations sitting behind nationalists' appropriation of Holocaust-related memory laws in several eastern European and Baltic states. While these accounts have shed important light on memory politics, there remains much scope for further study. For example, several Eastern European and Baltic states have passed resolutions recognizing the Armenian genocide, as well. Furthermore, the existing literature does not provide any analytical tools to conceptualize the dynamic and complex processes giving rise to memory laws. This article broadens the memory laws scholarship through an original analysis of Latvia's Armenian genocide recognition resolution of 2021. The findings highlight how diverse actors support and pass memory laws through a process of constructivist memory politics. Constructivist memory politics involves the strategies political actors employ to change the salience or meaning of historical events in the creation and promotion of memory laws. Although the analysis focuses on a single case, it provides the analytical tools to reorient how scholars approach memory laws both in Europe and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the political aspect of the recognition of the Armenian genocide has mostly focused on the realpolitik and its impact in terms of legislation and relations between political actors. A new dimension in research regarding the Armenian genocide occurred by presenting legal performativity within memory laws in France and Germany. Here, I build on the understanding that performative analysis may help us uncover the deeper circumstances of the recognition of the Armenian genocide, going beyond the classical dichotomy—recognition/nonrecognition. The case of the Czech Republic revealed the problem in the division of executive power regarding foreign policy between the government and the president. Furthermore, the analysis revealed the parliamentary instruments legitimizing the recognition of the Armenian genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sudden death of Rev. George P. Knapp (1863–1915), head of the American Mission in Bitlis and pioneer investigator of the Armenian genocide, has remained unresolved for over a century. A hitherto ignored deposition from 1919 describes his tragic last days and murder by Turkish gendarmes escorting him to Diarbekir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study overviews some of the issues surrounding the use, abuse, and misuse of Medz Yeghern, the most common proper name for the genocide of the Armenian, tracing the genealogy of the term yeghern and the evolution of its primary meaning from “evil” to “(heinous) crime,” “massacre,” and “genocide” over the past century and half. An erudite conflation of the Classical Armenian homophone words yeghern (եղեռն, “evil, crime”) and yegher (եղեր, “lamentation”) in the nineteenth century resulted in the secondary meaning “tragedy, calamity, catastrophe.” It also marked the conflation of cause and consequence in a single word, despite the use of yeghern accompanied by active verbs only, which indicates cause. The use of Medz Yeghern, therefore, point out to the central role of the perpetrator; the word yeghern has been used to translate “cultural genocide” and “genocide recognition” as synonym to tseghasbanutiun (ցեղասպանութիւն). This ambiguity was exploited during the first two decades of the current century, especially in Turkey and the United States. Interpretive denial adopted the name Medz Yeghern to avoid the use of “genocide,” choosing the meanings “Great Catastrophe” and “Great Calamity” and turning the cause into consequence. The article offers a reconsideration of the semantic and political issues behind the use of Medz Yeghern and suggests, on the basis of linguistic evidence, that the literal translation of the proper name, according to context and time of use, should be “Great (Heinous) Crime” or “Great Genocide.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how pre-Genocide foreign missionary activity prepared the way for relief and existential support during and after the Armenian Genocide of 1915–1921. Examples are drawn from American, British, and German Protestant missionary organisations, especially the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the Turkish Missions Aid Society or Bible Lands Missions Aid Society, and the Christlicher Hilfsbund im Orient. These agencies developed missionary and relief methods and transnational networks which were utilised by the Action Chrétienne en Orient (ACO) and other twentieth-century mission agencies in their work among Armenian communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual violence has only recently gained significant attention and been recognised as a tool of war and genocide. One of the most recent developments has been the recognition of forced marriages as a crime against humanity while forming part of a systematic, widespread assault on a civilian population. Although the concept of forced marriage emerged after the conflict in Sierra Leone, its origins can be traced back to the Armenian Genocide of 1915. This article provides an overview of the development of the concept of forced marriage in international criminal law and focuses on the forced marriages that took place during the Armenian Genocide, while also presenting an explanation of marriage practices in the Ottoman Empire. It also presents a considerable amount of evidence of state-orchestrated forced marriages as part of violence perpetrated against women during the Armenian Genocide and argues that forced marriages were used as a tool of genocide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes how the repressed memory of the Armenian Genocide haunted the novels of Halide Edib, a pioneer of Turkish nationalism, and other writers in 1909 when lost witnessing was still possible. Topics discussed are constitutional ideals of Ottomanism, collective mourning as shared experience, role of Abdulhamid II's tyrannical regime in the massacres, Edib's conveyance of grief that opened collective mourning and implication of her withdrawal from witnessing for feminist struggles.

The article focuses on Kurt Vonnegut's lesser-known and underappreciated 1987 novel Bluebeard, which is analyzed and interpreted in the light of Marianne Hirsch's seminal theory of postmemory. Even though it was published prior to Hirsch's formulation of the concept, Vonnegut's novel intuitively anticipates it, problematizing the implications of inherited, second-hand memory. To further complicate matters, Rabo Karabekian, the protagonist-narrator of Bluebeard, a World War II veteran, amalgamates his direct, painful memories with those of his parents, survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Both the novel and the theory applied to it centre on the problematics of historical and personal trauma, engendered by two genocides which are often the object of comparative analyses: the Armenian Genocide, also referred to as the Armenian Holocaust, and the Jewish Holocaust. The latter is central to Hirsch's interdisciplinary work in the field of memory studies, encompassing literature, the visual arts and gender studies. In Bluebeard, Vonnegut holds to account a humanity responsible for the atrocities of twentieth-century history: two world wars and two genocides for which they respectively established the context. The article examines the American writer's reflection on death and violence, man's destructive impulse and annihilation. In a world overshadowed by memories of mass extermination, Vonnegut interrogates the possibility of a new beginning, pointing to women as agents of renewal and sociopolitical change. He also identifies the role that art plays in the process of potential reconstruction, the story of Karabekian, a failed artist and highly successful art collector, being a Künstlerroman with a feminist edge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational‐theoretical discussions of open‐mindedness and closed‐mindedness focus on the moral benefits and hazards of these dispositions in pedagogical encounters with the new and hitherto alien. Such discussions often employ spatial metaphors of openness and rely on politically safe examples to illustrate ambiguous enactments of open‐mindedness and closed‐mindedness as epistemic or moral virtues and vices. This article explores how a shift in our metaphors and a change in attention from the new to the "inflammatory (un)controversial" may complicate current outlooks on open‐mindedness and politicize it differently. To illustrate this critique of virtue‐theoretic approaches to open‐mindedness, the article uses fictive classroom exchanges on Holocaust and genocide denialism as (un)controversial material that ignites minds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Liji, as I have come to know her, told me she is content with her life. Anything she dreamt of achieving was always within her reach. Her silences told me otherwise. Her life story is one that both complements and contradicts the master narrative of the Turkish nation. In this essay, I explore her life story as she shared it with me one afternoon sitting in her summer flat on Büyükada. I have added quotes from her memoirs and used unique archival material to fill in some of the gaps, but I have left her silences be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of the transformation and political change in Armenia pays noticeable attention to the dominant role of discourses of the Armenian Genocide and the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh for nation and state-building processes. At the same time, the two issues usually are investigated separately. Attempts are rarely made to interpret the interrelation and connection between the two narratives. Nevertheless, the trauma-based discourse of memory is linking the two narratives as technology of power through discursive structures/mechanisms of analogy and continuity. Methods of discourse analysis combined with expert interviews, internet questionnaires and ethnographic field research aim to analyse the crucial discursive patterns and mechanisms. Hypothetically, instrumentalized and ideological usage of combined narratives are impacting the political changes, in Post-Soviet Armenia. The article touches upon only one aspect of the discursive interrelation between the Armenian Genocide and the Nagorno-Karabakh issue. Thus, the subject under the question is the impact of the usage of historical analogy and the idea of continuity understand as technologies on contemporary Armenian politics of memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memorials are one of the most common forms of memorialization and may be understood as symbolic reparations for the victims and survivors of mass violence. They acknowledge the suffering and grief of the victims and pay tribute to the dead. At the same time, the memorials epitomises not only history but also teaches contemporary lessons of local and global character. The Armenian Genocide Memorial as a symbol of grief and revival of the Armenian nation serves all these aims. This article aims to address some points of history of the construction of the Armenian Genocide Memorial, its local and global implications, the issue of absence of names in the Memorial, as well as the feelings of patriotism and statehood embedded in the Armenian Genocide Memorial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historiography has analyzed the recognition of the Armenian genocide using cultural and geopolitical coordinates belonging to both Western and Non-Western societies. However, the North-South dimension of this event and its effect on the diaspora has been neglected by most of the approaches taken by Armenian studies. In this article, I will analyze how the Armenian diaspora in Argentina advocated for recognition of the Armenian genocide from 1965 to 2015. This community is not only significant in terms of population - it is the largest in the Global South - but also because its contribution to the struggle for remembrance and recognition of the Armenian genocide is unique. Argentina is one of the few countries in which the genocide has been recognized by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. In this article, I will analyze the specific dynamics of the Armenian-Argentine community's local activism and its contribution to the global recognition of the genocide.1 The commemoration on April 24 in the official Argentine calendar, the recognition of the extermination of Armenians as genocide by Francis I, Roman Catholicism's first Argentinean Pope, demonstrate the importance of the interaction between the local and global. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of the article is to discuss whether food procurement methods during the Armenian Genocide could be considered as unarmed resistance. For this purpose, the first part of the article touched upon some scientific questions and the formation of the concept of unarmed resistance in the context of the Holocaust. Such scientific interest was inspired by the fact that though there had been instances of armed resistance during the Armenian Genocide, fights in self-defense, including those with victorious outcomes, as in Van, nonetheless there existed an opinion that the Armenians were to be blamed, to some extent, to have been "slaughtered like sheep," i.e. without resistance. For that very reason, the purpose of this article was to offer a scholarly assessment of the concept of "resistance" by suggesting its subcategories as subjects for separate research. Indeed, it is impossible to cover all the viewpoints on the problem and all the forms of resistance within one article; however, this article was an attempt to formulate new queries. In the second section of the article, an attempt is made to group food procurement methods during the Armenian Genocide and consider them in the context of the concept of unarmed resistance. Special attention is paid to the experiences of children, trying also to identify the types of activities that the social groups were involved in and the extent of involvement. Food acquisition methods that were part of the daily life during the Armenian Genocide are discussed as expressions of conscious and unconscious struggle against the genocidal policy of condemning people to starvation. The article is based on published memoires and oral histories of the Armenian Genocide survivors.1 Although food procurement methods were diverse, the article offers the most common forms: feeding on wild grass, collecting fruits, berries, and nuts, begging, often referred to by the survivors as life and death struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genocide is the most violent denial of human identity, and it aims systematically to transform the societal organization of both victims and perpetrators. Considered the first among the genocides of the 20th century, the massacre of around 1.5 million Armenians has been denied official recognition by the Turkish government to date. Such denial has resisted not only international political pressure, but also evidence provided by news articles, editorials, and by letters to the editor documenting or referring to the massacre. Many letters to the editor of The Times mention the massacres that were later to be referred to as the Armenian genocide; the corpus analysed in this study includes those published closer to the events, between 1914 to 1926. Letters to the editor of a newspaper are selected for publication when their content fosters debate among the readers on topics which are particularly relevant for the newspaper's agenda, and they have rarely been the target of linguistic analysis. This study examines the linguistic patterns used to represent the Armenian genocide at the time of the events, and how these patterns influence the perception of the Armenian identity via its representation through the letters to the editor. Concordance lines, collocations, clusters and extended co-textual references of keywords related to the Armenian national identity will be analysed using a corpus-assisted approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following is a translation of a lecture delivered in French by Zabel Yesayan at the Engineers Hall on 17 January 1920. The talk was originally published, seemingly without much editing, in the French Revue des Études Arméniennes 2 (1922): 121-138. The lyricism of this nationalist panegyric and ode to the Armenian woman exposes the author's raw emotions, as she describes the exodus of Armenians from their homeland during World War I, their struggle, their resilience, and the crimes committed against them. Zabel Yesayan's speech is altogether révolté -- in the sense of moral and political indignation -- and righteous. It also reveals with poignant and at times excruciating details, the gendered violence that conventional political narratives often silence about women, especially during genocide. The page numbers referenced below in brackets correspond to the page numbers in the Revue des Études Arméniennes publication. I have maintained as much as possible the orality of this speech, delivered in florid, melodramatic, nineteenth-century oratory style. I have, however, added punctuation when the lack thereof led to confusion or unintelligibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of pieces that follow intersect with what I refer to in this essay as the dual performative acts of iconification and translation that frame our approach to Zabel Yesayan over the last few decades. Maral Aktokmakyan's critical essay, "So Did We Really Find Yesayan?: Notes on 'Yesayan Studies' and Beyond" coins the author's recent iconification as "Yesayan fever" and warns us that the emergent sub-field of Yesayan Studies may be overly reliant on translations and thus endangering the integrity of the author's original literary voice in Armenian. Meriam Belli and Elyse Semerdjian offer us two translations from French, of a speech and a report drafted by Yesayan in Paris, in 1919. Belli's "Chronicle: The Role of Armenian Women during the War" and Semerdjian's "The Liberation of non-Muslim Women and Children in Turkey: Notes on the question of the abduction of non-Muslim women and children by the Turks, retained until today by Muslims" give us a glimpse of Yesayan's work as an activist and capture the author's haunting style of testimonial writing. As Semerdjian notes in her subsequent analytical discussion of the translation, Yesayan's report not only reveals the gendered mode of the Armenian genocide and women's victimhood within it, but it also calls for political action in addressing the plight of Armenian women and highlights their capacity for resistance. Together, this collection of think-pieces and translations contributes to the ongoing debates of searching for Yesayan's elusive figure and understanding Yesayan the writer, but it ultimately guides the reader back to her own words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nagorno-Karabagh is a long-drawn-out conflict crafted around two competing positions identified as self-determination and state sovereignty. The political tactics of Stalin based on divide and rule and pan-Turkism in 1870 coupled with the Armenian genocide in 1914 fuelled the deep hatred and antagonism crammed between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the mountainous terrain of Nagorno-Karabagh. This paper attempts to comprehend the dynamic nature of this protracted conflict (in 2020) with the perspective of newly emerging regional alliances in the south Caucuses. It recognizes the convoluted regional interests that shaped a recipe of convergence between Azerbaijan, Russia, and Turkey that led to controlled chaos and one-sided settlement in Nagorno-Karabagh at the dispense of Karabagh Armenians. It addresses how this decisive war between Azerbaijan and Armenia transformed the landscape of future warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a 'distant' setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the role of institutions and ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a well-known fact that the Islamisation of Christian children in the Ottoman Empire has a long history. In the great majority of cases Islamisation was carried out forcibly, accompanied by the erasure of a child's ethnic-religious identity for those who remembered it and totally hiding their ethnic roots and religious affi liation from those who didn't. The whole process of cultivating a new identity and character was a matter of time and of contested methods. This article identifi es a problem area, raising questions and analyzing the role of Turkish intellectual Halidé Edip in the state policy of Turkifi cation of Armenian children at the Antoura orphanage during the Armenian Genocide. It draws comparisons between the three memoirs of Armenian orphans from that orphanage that are known to date, those of Garnik Banean (Karnig Panian as written in his English language memoir), Harutyun Alboyajyan, and Melgon Petrosean and that written by Halidé Edip. As a result, certain essential differences, ploys, as well as facts disguised by Edip have been collected and presented in this article. Therefore, the research carried out identifi es the problems areas relating to various aspects of the Antoura orphanage by raising new questions, offering explanations and new approaches as well as highlighting issues that need to be researched further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies Diana Agabeg Apcar's (1859-1937) perspective regarding the proposed American mandate over genocide-ravaged Armenia. It touches on aspects of historical empathy that are important in assessing the true nature of historical events. Through examining Diana Apcar's correspondence with different individuals such as David Starr Jordan, Thomas J. Edmonds, Charles Albert Gobat as well as her articles related to this topic, this article aims to reveal the attitudes, opinions and mindset of this Armenian historical fi gure regarding the mandate issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

References to the issues of the number of Western Armenians and the ratio of Armenians to other ethnic groups in Western Armenia on the eve of the Armenian Genocide occupy a special place in the context of processes related to drafting a peace agreement with the Ottoman Empire and Armenia's delineation after WWI. These issues were tackled by diverse Armenian offi cial and non-offi cial organizations struggling for the formation of an integral Armenian state, as well as Turkish authorities manipulating, inter alia, also demographic arguments against the Armenian claim for Western Armenia1 and the Entente Powers (particularly the United States of America and Great Britain) needing statistical data for deciding the fate of the Ottoman Empire. In the post-war processes the long-distance controversy of the Armenian and Turkish sides over the issues in question can be fi guratively characterized as one of the stages -"battles" of the "statistical war" that emerged after 1878, i.e. following the entry of the Armenian Question into the international diplomatic agenda. This article aims to present and analyse the statistics on the number of Western Armenians and the ratio of Armenians in Western Armenia to other ethnic groups on the eve of the Armenian Genocide presented by Armenian and Turkish delegations at Paris Peace Conference, as well as data circulated by the US and British diplomacy. It will try to explain the connection between the delineation of Armenia and the number of Western Armenians, the demographic composition of Western Armenia on the eve of the Armenian Genocide. The calculations of the number of Western Armenians have had a certain effect on deliberations around demarcation of the border between the Republic of Armenia and the Ottoman Empire in the context of post-war world regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917), an unknown number of female victims were forcibly tattooed, often on the face. Inscribing them with an alien identity, their captors permanently regulated the women's bodies in order to assimilate them into their communities. Some women eventually escaped and found shelter in orphanages or women's houses, but the tattoos remained on their skin, constituting a barrier to their reintegration. These women were stigmatized and shunned, their tattoos seen as a sign of sexual impurity and "transculturation". The tattoos needed to be removed - and the women's bodies regulated once again. Approaching tattoos as a means of regulation, this article explores how inscription materializes power dynamics in the context of the female body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deportations and massacres of religious and ethnic minorities in the late Ottoman Empire are prime examples of a homogenization technology (Alesina et al. 2013), a policy implemented in order to homogenize a population along some identitarian margin (ethnic, religious, etc.). The Sultan Abdülhamid II encouraged the massacre of Armenians by Kurdish raiders from 1894-1896 in order to suppress Armenian nationalist parties. Similarly, the ideologically malleable Committee of Union and Progress attempted to unify the Ottoman Empire against the West, first through a failed policy of multi-ethnic Ottomanism, and then through an ethnically exclusionary Pan-Turkism. Turkism resulted in the mass deportation of Greeks on the eve of World War I and the Armenian Genocide, resulting in the deaths of more than one million Anatolian Armenians. The Turkish government was able to offset the costs of the genocide by an organized campaign to take land from Armenian citizens, and give it to new Muslim refugees from the Balkan states. I incorporate Johnson and Koyama's (2019) work on religious toleration and state capacity. I describe the conditions for a genocide to be a viable homogenization technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the reasons and processes that led the Obama administration to not recognize the Armenian Genocide. Although Barack Obama had promised he would do so during his presidential campaign of 2008, he never did once in office, despite many of his administration members, including Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, having strong records in support of such a recognition. To investigate this hitherto poorly explored question, this paper uses primarily -- although not exclusively -- memoirs written by Barack Obama and members his administration, some of them addressing the issue directly, others dealing with it indirectly. This study focuses on President Obama's personal choice, and therefore responsibility, to not recognize the genocide, but also expands on the geopolitical determinants of this non-recognition (related mostly to the geostrategic importance of Turkey) as well as on its diplomatic aspects (involving particularly the argument that US recognition would hamper a hypothetical Turkey-Armenia rapprochement). Two episodes of possible presidential recognition of the genocide will be particularly discussed; one in April 2009 (three months after Obama became president of the United States and coinciding with April 24, the anniversary of the genocide), and the other in 2015 (corresponding to its centenary). Finally, stress will be placed on the positions and role of the president's entourage at the White House, and on his State and Defense Secretaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the Bulgarian-Armenian writer Suren Vetsigian's autobiographical writing, published posthumously in 2001. The story in the book reflects the author's memory of the Armenian genocide and his life in exile abroad in different countries. I shall argue that while on the one side Vetsigian's life choices are an emblematic example of the diasporic writers' commitment to their language and culture as a way to reaffirm national identity, on the other hand they typify an act of self-sacrifice: the author renounces career opportunities in a Western country to sacrifice himself to an inward vision and the work of a mission for his own people, which he intended to fulfil in Bulgaria, an Eastern country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the authors respond to Laura Robson's "Memorialization and Assimilation: Armenian Genocide Memorials in North America," published in Mashriq & Mahjar in 2017, regarding analysis of the history of Armenian Genocide memorials in the U.S., the relationship between these memorials and Holocaust memorials, and Armenian assimilation in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short commentary aims to describe the role of political subjectivity and the researcher's memory in fieldwork by focusing on a self-reflective account of my ethnographic fieldwork. This reflection comes after two years of ethnographic inquiry into sensory experience and observation of how memory is performed in relation to personal photographs and objects. It is part of an ongoing Ph.D. thesis about the post-memories of Armenian Genocide descendants in the diaspora, where I seek to understand how they remember the past in the present by observing their sensory engagement with the past. As well as this, the fieldwork shows the necessity of auto-ethnographic inquiry of the researcher, given that I am Turkish. This commentary ultimately asks what the role is of political subjectivity in ethnographic fieldwork, thinking especially of visual mediation in the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]