Collective and State Violence in Turkey

The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State

Stephan Astourian, Raymond Kévorkian, Stephan Astourian, Raymond Kévorkian

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789204506
• eBook ISBN: 9781789204513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: 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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I — Case Studies in the Ottoman Empire
• Chapter 1 — On the Genealogy of the Armenian–Turkish Conflict, Sultan Abdülhamid and the Armenian Massacres
• Chapter 2 — The Long Assyrian Genocide
• Chapter 3 — The Hamidian Massacres: Gendered Violence, Biopolitics and National Honour
• Chapter 4 — On Collective Responsibility in the Extermination of Ottoman Armenians
• Chapter 5 — The Final Phase: The Cleansing of Armenian and Greek Survivors, 1919–1922
• Chapter 6 — Collective State Violence against Greeks in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1821–1923
• Part II — Case Studies in Republican Turkey
• Chapter 7 — The Attempted Pogrom against the Jews of Thrace, June–July 1934
• Chapter 8 — A History of Armenians Remaining in Turkey: Survival and Denial
• Chapter 9 — The Events of 6–7 September 1955: Greeks, Armenians and Jews within the Context of the Strategies of the Turkish Republic
• Chapter 10 — State Violence in ‘Kurdistan’
• Chapter 11 — Physical and Epistemic Violence against Alevis in Modern Turkey
• Chapter 12 — Inscriptions of Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Memory Narrations from Dersim
• Chapter 13 — The Yazidis: Resilience in Times of Violence
• Part III — Thematic Essays
• Chapter 14 — ‘Who Did This to Us?’: Blaming the Enemies as Part of Turkey’s Authoritarian Political Culture
• Chapter 15 — Nationalism and History, Masks of Violence
• Chapter 16 — Public Violence in Turkey from the Nineteenth Century Onwards
• Chapter 17 — Structures of Power, Coercion and Violence in Republican Turkey
• Afterword: Shapes, Legitimation, and Legacies of Violence in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey
• Index