2016/11/20 by Eldad Ben Aharon · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Turkey's Politics and Society
paper · doi:10.1093/jsh/shw140
openalex publication_date 2016/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
One of the serious risks involved in undertaking research on the denial of the Armenian Genocide has been the moral engagement and emotional attachment of some of the scholars involved in this particularly sensitive research. This problem tends to distract scholars, and hence their readers, from approaching empirical evidence and historical analysis with an open mind. In a very self-aware manner, Fatma Müge Göçek's book mostly manages to avoid this problem. Although this topic has been addressed from a few perspectives and by generations of scholars, such as Richard Hovannisian, Israel Charny, Yair Auron, Roger W. Smith, Taner Akçam, Uğur Ümit Üngör, Tunç Aybak, Marc Mamigonian and others, Denial of Violence by Göçek is an excellent monograph that offers, for the most part, nuanced interpretations of empirical research to fill a substantial gap in scholarship on this topic. In overview, the recent trend in Holocaust and genocide studies has been to approach the Armenian Genocide not so much as an example of the first modern genocide than as a part of the complexities of the last period of the Ottoman and European empires and the creation of an ethnically homogenous nation-state system. Göçek's focus on these “interconnected modernities” (23) parallels that of Donald Bloxham (2005) and more recently Raymond Kévorkian (2011) and Ronald Grigor Suny (2015).1 This trend is also apparent in the works of Taner Akçam (2004) and Erik Jan Zürcher’ (2004) on modern Turkish history, each of which explore that history (modern Turkish history) in the context of the transformation from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic.2 Göçek’s contribution to this literature is to apply this idea of “interconnected modernities” to the denial of the violence perpetrated against the Ottoman Armenians in earlier periods and thus to understand the 1915 Genocide, and the history of its denial, in tandem with the histories of earlier violence against Armenians. More specifically, while most of the works on the denial of the Armenian Genocide focuses on the aftermath of the Genocide (1921 and onwards), Göçek explores that aftermath through a nuanced understanding of earlier massacres against the Ottoman Armenians (1893-1896).