The Armenian Genocide Debate as a Paradigm of Conceptual Blockage in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

This paper addresses a major conceptual blockage in Holocaust and Genocide Studies/Historiographies: the tendency to depoliticize genocidal violence by attributing its perpetration above all to ethnic or “racial” hatred. A significant Armenian narrative shoehorns the Armenian experience into this Holocaust-inspired paradigm: Muslim anti-Armenian sentiments come to resemble antisemitism, and the genocide is seen as the outcome of decades of ever-intensifying ethnic hatred in the name of Turkish ethnic purity. Rather than the war and its lead-up operating as the contexts in which ethnic difference becomes fatally politicized, it is merely a pretext for a long-held intention to kill off the Armenian minority whose aspirations for independent nationhood are naturally legitimate, whatever their implications for the Ottoman Empire’s integrity, still less for independent Turkish nationhood. What is more, the notion of an Armenian rebellion or security threat is played down to emphasize Armenians agentlessness; the more passive the victims, the less likely they can be found guilty of treason. By contrast, the scholarly and Turkish state’s rejection of the Armenian claim is that the country faced a concurrent invasion and internal Armenian rebellion which provoked the understandable decision to deport Christian civilians from military areas and to crush the rebellion. In circumstances of emergency and panic, so the argument goes, it was regrettable that many Armenian civilians perished, but then so did many Muslims. This paper argues that these seemingly irreconcilable positions can be transcended by rethinking the relationship between genocide and politics: genocide as a particular type of response to a security emergency.