2017/03/30 by Keith David Watenpaugh · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #Islamic Studies and History
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/122.2.478
openalex publication_date 2017/03/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
A hundred years ago, the Ottoman Empire embarked upon a centrally organized and bureaucratized process of forced displacement, extermination, mass rape, theft of property, and the sale of children to eliminate its Armenian community, one of the largest ethnicities in a modern state that encompassed the great world-city of Istanbul, Anatolia, modern-day Iraq, and the Arab Eastern Mediterranean. Ronald Grigor Suny’s “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide and Fatma Müge Göçek’s Denial of Violence: Ottoman Pasts, Turkish Presents, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789–2009 join a host of books published during the centennial observations of that genocide. These two books, however, are also something much more. Suny and Göçek formed the collegial bond at the center of a decade-long movement to bring high research standards and a strong sense of professionalism to the study of one of the most brutal moments of twentieth-century history. Their books are their individual statements on the outcome of that process; they are a testament to how their efforts, friendship, and deep sense of compassion have helped transform a body of scholarship that had been deformed by the pernicious and inhumane project of Turkish-government-sponsored genocide denial into a rigorous field of historical inquiry that contributes to larger questions about mass violence, memory, and the role of trauma in history.