Collective and State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State

Collective and State Violence in Turkey: The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State

Astourian, Stephan and Kévorkian, Raymond.
Berghahn, 2020, 750 pages. ISBN 978-1-78920-450-6.

Description:
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.

Stephan Astourian is the William Saroyan Director of the Armenian Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Associate Adjunct Professor in Armenian and Caucasian history in its Department of History.

Raymond Kévorkian is a historian, Director of research emeritus at the Institut Français de Géopolitique (Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis), and President of Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation (Erevan). He is the author of works on the Ottoman Armenian society, especially on mass violence.