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.

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.

Foreword

Introduction
Raymond H. Kévorkian

PART I: CASE STUDIES IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Chapter 1. On the Genealogy of the Armenian-Turkish Conflict, Sultan Abdülhamid, and the Armenian Massacres
Stephan H. Astourian

Chapter 2. The Long Assyrian Genocide
David Gaunt

Chapter 3. The Hamidian Massacres: Gendered Violence, Biopolitics, and National Honor
Aysenur Korkmaz

Chapter 4. On Collective Responsibility in the Extermination of Ottoman Armenians
Raymond H. Kévorkian

Chapter 5. The Final Phase: The Cleansing of Armenian and Greek Survivors (1919–1922)
Raymond H. Kévorkian

Chapter 6. Collective State Violence against Greeks in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1821–1923
George Shirinian

PART II: CASE STUDIES IN REPUBLICAN TURKEY

Chapter 7. The Attempted Pogrom Against the Jews of Thrace, June–July 1934
Rifat Bali

Chapter 8. A History of Armenians Remaining in Turkey: Survival and Denial
Talin Suciyan

Chapter 9. The Events of September 6–7, 1955: Greeks, Armenians, and Jews within the Context of the Strategies of the Turkish Republic
Dilek Güven

Chapter 10. State Violences in “Kurdistan”
Mesut Yeğen

Chapter 11. Physical and Epistemic Violence against Alevis in Modern Turkey
Markus Dressler

Chapter 12. Inscriptions of Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Memory Narrations from Dersim
Annika Törne

Chapter 13. The Yazidis: Resilience in Times of Violence
Caroline Schneider

PART III: THEMATIC ESSAYS

Chapter 14. “Who Did This to Us?” Blaming the Enemies as Part of Turkey’s Authoritarian Political Culture
Uǧur Derin

Chapter 15. Violence and Its Masks: History and Nation
Etienne Copeaux

Chapter 16. Public Violence in Turkey (19th–21st Centuries)
Hans-Lukas Kieser

Chapter 17. Structures of Power, Coercion, and Violence in Republican Turkey
Hamit Bozarslan

In Lieu of a Conclusion: Shapes, Legitimation, and Legacies of Violence in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey
Stephan H. Astourian

Index