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This chapter contends that there are two reasons why the concept of assimilation was detached from the study of genocide. First, Armenian Genocide studies have suffered from the general weaknesses of the emerging field. Occupying the central place in these debates as a sine qua non, the Holocaust became the yardstick against which an event might or might not measure up as a genocide. As with other instances of mass violence, the fear that the events of 1915 would not be considered genocide if they did not resemble the Holocaust precluded serious analysis along the lines of dynamic social processes. Second, the understanding of assimilation as a process of the Armenian Genocide has been hampered by the character of available sources, mainly German and American consular reports, as well as missionary and survivor accounts.

This chapter explains that there are certain theses in the discussions about the Armenian Genocide which linger in the people's memory. These include the now-classic arguments that Armenian Catholics and Protestants, and the Armenians of Istanbul and Izmir, were not deported. Families of soldiers were not touched, and despite it being wartime, the government opened investigations against state officials who acted badly toward the Armenians during the deportations. Another important argument added in recent years is that the organization known as the Special Organization, which in fact enjoyed an official status through its association with the War Ministry, had no connection whatsoever with the annihilation of the Armenians.

Chapter 8 analyzes the culmination of the Eastern Question by analyzing American reactions to the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1917 and President Woodrow Wilson’s failed plans for an American mandate over Armenia. It examines the role played by the United States in establishing the larger mandate system in the Middle East. The primary actors involved in pushing for such a system included political and diplomatic elites, such as Woodrow Wilson and Henry Morgenthau, who worked closely with American missionaries, including Josiah Strong and James Barton. It also analyzes how American support for the Balfour Declaration built on previous arguments about the Jewish Question in Europe to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In concludes with an analysis of the King-Crane Commission.

The Introduction contextualizes the Armenian population in Lebanon. It distinguishes between Armenians who lived in Lebanon prior to the division of the Ottoman Empire, in the wake of the Armenian Genocide, and after the establishment of French and British mandatory rule in the Levant. In addition, it outlines the ecclesiastic, class, linguistic, and political gamut of the Armenian population in Lebanon. It analyzes how Armenians organized themselves according to the villages and centers in the Ottoman Empire that they hailed from and reformed their political ideologies, affiliations, and ecclesiastic connections resulting in the establishment of mini-enclaves within Armenian-populated neighborhoods in Lebanon. The introduction also positions the book within four fields: histories of Armenians, Lebanon, the Cold War in the Middle East, and the Diaspora Studies. The innovation of linking these fields together through the themes of identification, belonging, and articulating citizenship produces fresh readings of the time period. This intervention draws attention to experiences that established scholarship does not adequately tackle, increasing the possible ways and methods to study and approach the region, its inhabitants, and historical time frame.

This chapter discusses the origins and execution of the mass deportations of Albanians, Greeks and Armenians during the First World War. Rather than emphasize the role of Turkish nationalism in influencing the Ottoman government's decision to deport and murder large numbers of its non-Muslim citizens, the chapter underscores the state's concerns over the internal security of the region. It carefully points out the contradictions found within the state's decision for large numbers of these three groups, as well as the many acts of local resistance to this policy. Most accounts of the Armenian Genocide do not pay close attention to the consequences of the return of thousands of Armenians to the South Marmara after 1918, something which is dicussed in the latter part of this chapter.

This chapter analyzes the content of, and changes and continuities in, Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian Genocide between 1950 and the early 1990s. While the genocide was silenced in the decades after World War II, the silence came under increasing international pressure in the 1970s. Armenian terrorism, combined with increased international recognition of the genocide, eventually led Turkish officials to end the silence about the genocide. Starting in 1981, the state’s narrative shifted from silencing and denying the genocide to an actively defended and articulated position that relativized the violence and presented an alternative account of what had happened. This shift also involved substantial continuity, particularly in the denial of official responsibility for the deaths of Armenians. The net effect of these changes involved the strengthening of official denial of the genocide, alongside a limited acknowledgment that something had happened to Ottoman Armenians.

This chapter analyzes Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian Genocide over the period from 1994 to 2008. In the mid-1990s, subtle changes emerged in the tone and substance of the state’s narrative. Overall, however, despite major structural changes at the international level – including the end of the Cold War and Armenian independence – and the beginnings of domestic challenges to the state’s thesis, the content of the narrative was remarkably stable. These continuities stemmed in particular from feedback effects that reinforced domestic constraints on change. Beginning in 2001, the narrative shifted more substantially, coming to include a limited acknowledgment of Armenian deaths and suffering, while rationalizing these facts and continuing to reject the label “genocide.” These changes were made primarily in response to increased international recognition of the genocide and the broadening of domestic contestation questioning the official narrative, and reflected officials’ continued territorial and identity concerns.

This chapter argues that the Armenian Genocide—the first large scale mass murder of the twentieth century—must be placed in a new context and understood within that context: the commencement of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states. Far from an isolated campaign against a single ethnoreligious group, the annihilation of the Armenians was part of an extremely comprehensive operation that was accomplished in order to save the empire. For this reason, it is not correct to interpret the Armenian Genocide along the lines of a clash between the empire's Muslim groups, more generally expressed by the concept of “Turk,” and its Christian elements. The Armenian Genocide must be understood and interpreted as a matter between the Ottoman state and its subjects that arose as a result of specific policies pursued by the regime.

Today, Armenians across the globe honor the cultural remembrance of the Armenian genocide. This is significant given that the victims of this historical event remain largely forgotten by the international community, including the media and political establishments. Seeking to achieve transitional justice, the Armenian community maintains a policy of formal recognition of the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. As this chapter shows, the framework of a collective Armenian memory has provided structure and focus for the forensic anthropological work conducted at Ras al-Ain in Syria in 2007. While investigations focused on the exhumations of human remains of those who had perished due to forced deportation, collaboration with the Armenian community proved invaluable. Community members shared their recollections of the events that had transpired at the site, and the forensic evidence in turn provided a sense of closure to the community.

This chapter surveys the Ottoman government’s deportation and resettlement policies in Anatolia during the First World War. While Young Turk officials would later claim that military and political imperatives drove Istanbul to internally exile large numbers of its citizens, it is clear that preexisting internal sociopolitical conditions played a defining role in inspiring the CUP’s plans to impose a policy of tehcir or deportation. Istanbul’s policies, which included mass transfers of civilian populations, the seizure of private property, and the massacre of innocent citizens, had devastating consequences for the empire’s Armenian population. The mass eviction and death of Armenians and many other groups helped to poison both international and domestic opinion against the empire and led to bitter sectarian divides within Ottoman society.

This chapter reviews the history and historiography of the Armenian Genocide, and outlines the trajectory of Turkey’s narrative of the “Armenian question” since its initial formulation in the wake of the genocide. Over time, Turkey has experienced sustained international pressures to acknowledge the organized and intentional nature of this violence. Since the early 1990s, domestic contestation from within Turkish society has also challenged the legitimacy of the state’s narrative. While Turkish officials have resisted acknowledging the genocidal nature of this violence, elements of Turkey’s narrative have changed. Specifically, the narrative has changed three times since 1950, each time after international pressures had heightened scrutiny of the state’s position. Crucially, however, when and how officials responded to accumulated pressures were shaped by concerns about threats to territorial integrity and national identity, and feedback effects from institutionalized power bases within Turkey.

This chapter discusses Peter Najarian’s illustrated memoirs, autobiographical narratives in book format that incorporate drawings, paintings, and photographs: Daughters of Memory, The Great American Loneliness, and The Artist and His Mother. The son of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, Najarian filters the story of his Armenian American family and community through Western art and literature, depicting his legacy of transgenerational trauma. In his assemblage of texts and images, Najarian grapples with the complex issues of representation, memory, history, and subjectivity, forcing readers to look anew.

The Armenian Genocide, which culminated in the first two decades of the 20th century, has long been a highly controversial topic as far as the new Turkish state is concerned. Turkey has traditionally either denied that it has inherited any of the obligations of the Ottoman Empire arising from those times, or it has claimed that the undisputed killing of over one million of Armenians, the deportations, and the expropriations or the survivors were not acts of genocide but the unfortunate consequences or collateral effects of war. However, it has been determined that Turkey has inherited the obligations under international law from the Ottoman Empire as the continuing state. This chapter focuses on Turkey's treatment of the properties left behind by the Armenians. It discusses how Turkey reneged on the initial promise of trusteeship and proceeded to fully confiscate or redistribute many of the properties and proceeded to transfer revenue from sales to the state coffers. It also suggests that Turkey, more precisely its officials, may be liable to a potential charge of persecution as a crime against humanity, for the systematic and/or widespread denial of the property rights.

Chapter 1 limns the chronology of speech and government-sponsored mass violence over the centuries. After an overview of pre-twentieth century hate rhetoric, it focuses on Ottoman propaganda in relation to the Armenian Genocide. It then describes the Nazi hate speech campaign against the Jews, the archetypal modern template for mass murder agitprop. It then moves to the post–Cold War period and examines the role of speech in the 1990s atrocities committed in the Balkans and Rwanda. The chapter concludes by examining more recent instances of atrocity rhetoric connected to mass crimes: postelection violence in Kenya and Côte d’Ivoire; extremist Buddhist attacks against Muslims in Myanmar; the Islamic State’s genocidal violence against the Yazidis; and Dinka versus Nuer bloodshed in South Sudan. In tracing this history, two overarching rhetorical strategies become apparent—exclusion (defaming and dehumanizing the out-group) and threat (warning that the out-group threatens violence so must be eliminated first).

This chapter introduces the book’s core questions, summarizes the stakes of inquiry, introduces the two narratives analyzed in the book, outlines the central argument, and situates this study in relation to existing scholarship on memory, transitional justice, and international norms. Given the challenges of reckoning with the past, what are the sources of continuity in states’ narratives of dark pasts, and when and why do states choose to change such narratives? To answer these questions, this book analyzes the trajectories over the past sixty years of Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the Nanjing Massacre and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Extrapolating from this analysis, the book argues that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, while domestic considerations determine the content of such change.