During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, the ethnic tensions between the minority populations within the empire led to the administration carrying out a systematic destruction of the Armenian people. This not only brought 2,000 years of Armenian civilisation within Anatolia to an end but was accompanied by the mass murder of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians. Containing a selection of papers presented at The Genocide of the Christian Populations of the Ottoman Empire and Its Aftermath (1908–1923) international conference, hosted by the Chair for Pontic Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, this book draws on unpublished archival material and an innovative historiographical approach to analyze events and their legacy in comparative perspective. In order to understand the historical context of the Ottoman Genocide, it is important to study, apart from the Armenian case, the fate of the Greek and Assyrian peoples, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of the situation. This volume is primarily a research contribution but should also be valued as a supplementary text that would provide secondary reading for undergraduates and postgraduate students.

The study of genocide has been appropriate in emphasizing the centrality of the Holocaust; yet, other preceding episodes of mass violence are of great significance. Taking a transnational and transhistorical approach, this volume redresses and replaces the silencing of the Armenian Genocide. Scholarship relating to the history of denial, comparative approaches in the deportations and killings of Greeks and Armenians during the First World War, and women’s histories during the genocide and post-genocide proliferated during the centennial of the Armenian Genocide in 2015. Collectively, however, these studies have not been enough to offer a comprehensive account of the historical record, documentation, and interpretation of events during 1915-1916. This study seeks to bridge the gap, by unsettling nationalist narratives and addressing areas such as aesthetics, gender, and sexuality. By bringing forward various dimensions of the human experience, including the political, socioeconomic, cultural, social, gendered, and legal contexts within which such silencing occurred, the essays address the methodological silences and processes of selectivity and exclusion in scholarship on the Armenian Genocide. The interdisciplinary approach makes Critical Approaches to Genocide a useful resource for all students and scholars interested in the Armenian Genocide and memory studies.

This book explores the multiplicity of women’s experiences in the Cambodian genocide during the four-year rule of the Khmer Rouge. The dominant discourses of genocide often speak from a patriarchal and national perspective, rendering women speechless, and yet in this volume, the female survivors of the Cambodian genocide testify not only to the specific atrocities committed during the war but also to the pre-war conditions that laid the groundwork for a gender-specific victimization of women and its continuation post-war. With the help of testimonies from Khmer women who joined the Khmer Rouge, women who experienced sexual violence during the Khmer Rouge era, women who fled the country, and the Cham women who faced expulsion from home, this book explores the diversity of women’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge. Survivors’ accounts show that a Khmer woman’s experience with the Khmer Rouge was considerably different from the experience of not only a Khmer man but also a woman from a religious or ethnic minority group or a woman who chose to join the Khmer Rouge. These differences are conveniently ignored in nationalist discourses in Cambodia and by western scholars of history and gender-based violence, and they are given even less consideration in discourses about women survivors in diaspora. Instead of forcing generalization and universalization of gendered crimes of war, Gender and Genocide in Cambodia employs feminist curiosity and closely examines women’s experiences under the Khmer Rouge from multiple vantage points. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in gender and cultural studies, political history, and modern history.

Turkey has gone through significant transformations over the last century—from the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk era to the Republic of today—but throughout it has demonstrated troubling continuities in its encouragement and deployment of mass violence. In particular, the construction of a Muslim-Turkish identity has been achieved in part by designating “internal enemies” at whom public hatred can be directed. This volume provides a wide range of case studies and historiographical reflections on the alarming recurrence of such violence in Turkish history, as atrocities against varied ethnic-religious groups from the nineteenth century to today have propelled the nation’s very sense of itself.

The Politics of Self-Determination examines the territorial restructuring of Europe between 1917 and 1923, when a radically new and highly fragile peace order was established. It opens with an exploration of the peace planning efforts of Great Britain, France, and the United States in the final phase of the First World War. It then provides an in-depth view on the practice of Allied border drawing at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, focussing on a new factor in foreign policymaking-academic experts employed by the three Allied states to aid in peace planning and border drawing. This examination of the international level is juxtaposed with two case studies of disputed regions where the newly drawn borders caused ethnic violence, albeit with different results: the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France in 1918-19, and the Greek-Turkish War between 1919 and 1922. A final chapter investigates the approach of the League of Nations to territorial revisionism and minority rights, thereby assessing the chances and dangers of the Paris peace order over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. Volker Prott argues that at both the international and the local levels, the 'temptation of violence' drove key actors to simplify the acclaimed principle of national self-determination and use ethnic definitions of national identity. While the Allies thus hoped to avoid uncomfortable decisions and painstaking efforts to establish an elusive popular will, local elites, administrations, and paramilitary leaders soon used ethnic notions of identity to mobilise popular support under the guise of international legitimacy. Henceforth, national self-determination ceased to be a tool of peace-making and instead became an ideology of violent resistance.

With its analytical introductory essays, more than 140 individual entries, a historical timeline, and primary documents, this book provides an essential reference volume on the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian Genocide has often been considered a template for subsequent genocides and is one of the first genocides of the 20th century. As such, it holds crucial historical significance, and it is critically important that today's students understand this case study of inhumanity. This book provides a much-needed, long-overdue reference volume on the Armenian Genocide. It begins with seven introductory analytical essays that provide a broad overview of the Armenian Genocide and then presents individual entries, a historical timeline, and a selection of documents. This essential reference work covers all aspects of the Armenian Genocide, including the causes, phases, and consequences. It explores political and historical perspectives as well as the cultural aspects. The carefully selected collection of perspective essays will inspire critical thinking and provide readers with insight into some of the most controversial and significant issues of the Armenian Genocide. Similarly, the primary source documents are prefaced by thoughtful introductions that will provide the necessary context to help students understand the significance of the material.

This massive, four-volume work provides students with a close examination of 10 modern genocides enhanced by documents and introductions that provide additional historical and contemporary context for learning about and understanding these tragic events. Modern Genocide: The Definitive Resource and Document Collection spans nearly 1,700 pages presented in four volumes and includes more than 120 primary source documents, making it ideal for high school and beginning college students studying modern genocide as part of a larger world history curriculum. The coverage for each modern genocide, from Herero to Darfur, begins with an introductory essay that helps students conceptualize the conflict within an international context and enables them to better understand the complex role genocide has played in the modern world. There are hundreds of entries on atrocities, organizations, individuals, and other aspects of genocide, each written to serve as a springboard to meaningful discussion and further research. The coverage of each genocide includes an introductory overview, an explanation of the causes, consequences, perpetrators, victims, and bystanders; the international reaction; a timeline of events; an Analyze section that poses tough questions for readers to consider and provides scholarly, pro-and-con responses to these historical conundrums; and reference entries. This integrated examination of genocides occurring in the modern era not only presents an unprecedented research tool on the subject but also challenges the readers to go back and examine other events historically and, consequently, consider important questions about human society in the present and the future.

This comprehensive Handbook gives an overview of the political, social, economic and legal dimensions of citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa from the nineteenth century to the present. The terms citizen and citizenship are mostly used by researchers in an off-hand, self-evident manner. A citizen is assumed to have standard rights and duties that everyone enjoys. However, citizenship is a complex legal, social, economic, cultural, ethical and religious concept and practice. Since the rise of the modern bureaucratic state, in each country of the Middle East and North Africa, citizenship has developed differently. In addition, rights are highly differentiated within one country, ranging from privileged, underprivileged and discriminated citizens to non-citizens. Through its dual nature as instrument of state control, as well as a source of citizen rights and entitlements, citizenship provides crucial insights into state-citizen relations and the services the state provides, as well as the way citizens respond to these actions. This volume focuses on five themes that cover the crucial dimensions of citizenship in the region: Historical trajectory of citizenship since the nineteenth century until independence Creation of citizenship from above by the state Different discourses of rights and forms of contestation developed by social movements and society Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion Politics of citizenship, nationality and migration Covering the main dimensions of citizenship, this multidisciplinary book is a key resource for students and scholars interested in citizenship, politics, economics, history, migration and refugees in the Middle East and North Africa.

During the first World War, over a million Armenians were killed as Ottoman Turks embarked on a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing. Scholars have long described these massacres as genocide, one of Hitler’s prime inspirations for the Holocaust, yet the United States did not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide until 2021. This is the first book to examine how and why the United States refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide until the early 2020s. Although the American government expressed sympathy towards the plight of the Armenians in the 1910s and 1920s, historian Julien Zarifian explores how, from the 1960s, a set of geopolitical and institutional factors soon led the United States to adopt a policy of genocide non-recognition which it would cling to for over fifty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. He describes the forces on each side of this issue: activists from the US Armenian diaspora and their allies, challenging Cold War statesmen worried about alienating NATO ally Turkey and dealing with a widespread American reluctance to directly confront the horrors of the past. Drawing from congressional records, rare newspapers, and interviews with lobbyists and decision-makers, he reveals how genocide recognition became such a complex, politically sensitive issue.

This book examines British responses to genocide and atrocity in the Ottoman Empire during the aftermath of World War I. The authors analyze British humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention through the advice and policies of the Foreign Office and British government in London and the actions of Foreign Officers in the field. British understandings of humanitarianism at the time revolved around three key elements: good government, atrocity, and the refugee crises; this ideology of humanitarianism, however, was challenged by disputed policies of post-war politics and goals regarding the Near East. This resulted in limited intervention methods available to those on the ground but did not necessarily result in the forfeiture of the belief in humanitarianism amongst the local British officials charged with upholding it. This study shows that the tension between altruism and political gain weakened British power in the region, influencing the continuation of violence and repression long after the date most perceive as the cessation of WWI. The book is primarily aimed at scholars and researchers within the field; it is a research monograph and will be of greatest interest to scholars of genocide, British history, and refugee studies, as well as for activists and practitioners.