Since the Centennial: New Departures in the Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide, 2015–2021

Abstract

After the explosion of writing on the Armenian Genocide in the centennial year, 2015, scholars have steadily produced new research and writing on the events of 1915–1916 in the late Ottoman Empire that have deepened our understanding of the trajectories and tragedies of those years. While a comprehensive review of everything published would require a small monograph, this chapter will review several important but diverse recent contributions: Hans-Lukacs Kieser, Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Ümit Kurt, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); and Harry Harootunian, The Unspoken Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and its Unaccounted Lives (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019).

The chapter will begin with a review of the historiography on the Armenian Genocide as of 2015. Scholarship produced during the last twenty-five years has essentially routed the denialist interpretation and established a firm foundation for understanding the ethnic cleansing, forced assimilation, property confiscations, and mass killing of Armenians and Assyrians as a genocide. The work of Raymond Kévorkian, Taner Akçam, Fatma Müge Goçek, Hilmar Kaiser, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Richard Hovannisian and his students, among them Stephan Astourian, and many Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian colleagues in Turkey has been essential. The Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship (WATS) has been an ongoing effort on the part of a number of scholars—Armenian, Turkish and other—to investigate the causes, circumstances and consequences of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, overcoming the politics of recognition and denial. The historical record has been made, although political and polemical campaigns against truth and accurate and evidenced historical knowledge continue both in Turkey and elsewhere.

The chapter will explore what is new, and whether the paradigm established by 2015 has changed, been amplified, and significantly improved. It will address the significant contributions made since 2015, beyond the “WATS consensus,” which was basically in place by the centennial year and formed the basis for my book “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else:” A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).