State Formation and Ethnic Cleansing in Late Ottoman Anatolia and Post-Ottoman Greater Syria: The Armenian Genocide in Regional and Temporal Perspective

What has the past two decades of interdisciplinary scholarship on the Armenian Genocide of World War I taught historians about the denouement and instrumentalization of the mass removal of minorities through murder and forced relocation of civilian populations the Ottoman Empire before and after WWI? This paper proposes to re-assess this literature from two perspectives: First, it will present an analytic review of the current state of the literature. This includes an overview of earlier studies by sociologists, political scientists and historians who relied primarily on Armenian survivors’ accounts and the testimony of foreign observers in addition to newer research which has broadened the search for evidence to the Ottoman, German, and Austrian archives to reconstruct motivations, methods and outcomes. Second, it attempts to integrate these new empirical findings and revised conceptual approaches into a longer term analysis of state formation the region before and after World War I, pointing to largely ignored parallels between 1860 and 1923 in Anatolia and post-Ottoman developments between 1920 and 1949 Greater Syria.