Soghomon Tehlirian was acquitted in Berlin in 1921 for the killing of Talat Paşa, Ottoman minister and architect of the Armenian Genocide. Complicating clear-cut distinctions between truth and fabulation, and personal revenge and legal justice, this paper examines the 1921 trial in light of Tehlirian’s 1953 memoir, to show the legal, moral, and epistemological work done by the ghost of Tehlirian’s mother. I move beyond the usual designations of Tehlirian as mere political assassin or self-evident moral witness and consider him instead as an “empirical fabulist.” My coinage of the term empirical fabulation is animated by Saidiya Hartman’s (2008) call for “critical fabulation,” and my reading of Tehlirian as an empirical fabulist recognizes him as a genocide survivor who aspired for collective justice, a son haunted by his mother’s ghost, and a historical actor who gave a fabricated testimony that was nonetheless based on the empirical facts of genocide. This paper is an invitation to explore the political and ethical potential, and perhaps even the necessity, of fabulation in recounting acts of genocidal violence that strain or defy straightforward representation, especially in cases when the existing rule of law does not rise to the demands for justice.

C. Wright Mills's critical work on international relations is well known, but is often dismissed as being unscholarly, reductionist, and overly polemical. However, seeing the work in the context of his earlier career can allow for a new perspective, with Mills's activist views on war and militarism shaped very clearly by his earlier theoretical and political commitments. Mills developed a distinctive political sociological understanding of international politics, theorising the state as a historically-situated structural determinant of international power: a network of elite power that was contextualised by the influence of the socially constructed realities of the international created by elites. Mills's crucial critical contribution was to see the role of the intellectual as criticising these realities through the imaginative reconceptualisation of the world, which he called the ‘politics of truth’. The article argues the international politics of truth was not only Mills's distinctive theory of the international, but that it was clearly supported by his early theorisation of the international. A revised view of the importance of Mills's international relations work can help to situate Mills as part of a broader tradition of IR scholarship, a lost lineage of the critical historical and political sociology of the international.

In his essays and speeches, Harold Pinter addressed issues that are central in political and philosophical debates: national identity and the other, the ethics of responsibility, the relational nature of human rights, the politics of death. Discussing his treatment of these issues, Maria Germanou sees Pinter as a Foucauldian intellectual engaged in the politics of truth, and argues that in these texts the postmodern writer enables the political activist. Pinter subjects to scrutiny naturalized political rhetoric, discloses the affinity between meaning and power, and challenges the legitimacy of established hierarchies and their practices. His ultimate purpose is to restore ethics to politics. To this end, he places responsibility for the other at the core of his problematic in ways similar to Emmanuel Levinas, and invites western democracies to redefine ‘humanity’ and the ‘international’ community by taking into consideration accountability for those allowed to die in the name of an alleged justice. Maria Germanou is Professor in English Drama at the University of Athens. She has published in Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Gramma, and elsewhere. Since 2008 she has been co-editor of Synthesis, an e-journal of comparative literature.