Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk ‘Social Engineering’

2008/01/01 by Uğur Ümit Üngör · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Turkey's Politics and Society #Balkans: History, Politics, Society #Political Conflict and Governance

paper · pdf · doi:10.4000/ejts.2583

openalex publication_date 2008/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02

Abstract

This article addresses population politics in the broader Young Turk era (1913-1950), which included genocide, deportation, and forced assimilation of various minority populations. The article opens with an account of the genesis of the concept ‘social engineering’ and provides a synopsis of the literature in the field of Young Turk population politics. It then focuses on the implementation of these nationalist population politics in the eastern provinces to exemplify these policies in detail. The article aims to clarify that the Armenian genocide cannot be understood in isolation from broader Young Turk population politics and argues that a generation of traumatized Young Turk politicians launched and perpetuated this violent project of societal transformation in order to secure the existence of a Turkish nation-state.

Citations

• Nature, Nurture, and Memory in a Socialist Utopia: Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism
• Ottoman Orientalism

Cited by

• Mapping action and identity in the Kobani crisis response
• Armenian genocide denial [wikipedia]

Related

• Embedded Turkification: Nation Building and Violence within the Framework of the League of Nations 1919–1937
• The Interconnection between Ethnicity, Ideology, and Genocide and their Reflection on the Armenian Genocide
• TANER AKCAM. The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire.
• Recent Studies on the September Pogrom in Istanbul 1955
• Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009. By Fatma Müge Göçek.