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The Grammar of Denial: State, Society, and Turkish–Armenian Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2015

Seyhan Bayraktar
Seyhan Bayraktar*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The existing literature on the denial of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 tends to concentrate on either the Turkish state's political practices or civil society's increasing openness to alternative readings of the event. I argue that both approaches reduce denialism to the political practices and defense mechanisms of Turkey by prioritizing the state as the sole agent of genocide denial. Although the state is indeed a dominant actor of denialism, to juxtapose state and society is to overlook the power that rests in the discourse itself and its pervasiveness across different—at times even competing—social and political settings.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , November 2015 , pp. 801 - 806
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank Marc Mamigonian, Ayda Erbal, and the editors of IJMES for their editorial comments.

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4 Bayraktar, Seyhan, Politik und Erinnerung: Der Diskurs über den Armeniermord in der Türkei zwischen Nationalismus und Europäisierung (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010)Google Scholar. This essay refers mainly to the results of research for this book.

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8 See also Jennifer Dixon, “Changing the State's Story: Continuity and Change in Official Narratives of Dark Pasts” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011).

9 For two seminal analyses of the Apology Campaign, see Erbal, Ayda, “Mea Culpas, Negotiations, Apologias: Revisiting the ‘Apology’ of Turkish Intellectuals,” in Reconciliation, Civil Society, and the Politics of Memory: Transnational Initiatives in the 20th and 21st Century, ed. Schwelling, Birgit (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012), 51–94Google Scholar; and Mamigonian, Marc, “Commentary on the Turkish Apology Campaign,” The Armenian Weekly, 21 April 2009, accessed 6 February 2015, http://armenianweekly.comGoogle Scholar.

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11 On the concept of “tactical concessions,” see Risse, Thomas, Ropp, Steven C., and Sikkink, Kathryn, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Ayata, Bilgin, “Tolerance as a European Norm or an Ottoman Practice? An Analysis of the Turkish Public Debates on the (Re)Opening of an Armenian Church in the Context of Turkey's EU Candidacy and Neo-Ottoman Revival,” KFK Working Paper Series 41 (2012)Google Scholar.

13 For the English version of the joint declaration by the organizers and participants of the conference, see Azad Hye, 28 May 2005, accessed 8 July 2015, http://azad-hye.blogspot.com/2005/05/joint-declaration-of-conference.html.

14 Ibid.

15 Bayramoğlu, Ali, “Kim Hain?,” Yeni Şafak, 26 May 2005Google Scholar.

16 See Talin Suciyan's analysis of how commemorations and memory activism have evolved in Turkey since 2010, and particularly her critical discussion of the one-hundredth anniversary commemorations: “Toplumsal Anma Pratikleri Şekillenirken, Bölüm II: İstanbul 24 Nisan 2015,” Azad Alik, 21 June 2015, accessed 8 July 2015, https://azadalik.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/toplumsal-anma-pratikleri-sekillenirken-bolum-ii-istanbul-24-nisan-2015/.