Session Abstract

Few events in modern history have been more fraught with controversy than the deportations and massacres of Armenians and Assyrians in the last years of the Ottoman Empire.  Campaigns to deny the essential evidence of mass killings, historiographical distortions, and governmental interventions to silence scholarship have combined to restrict understanding of what occurred and why.  An event of the magnitude of the 1915 mass killings has divided communities, inspired the fierce mobilization of nationalists on many sides, and yet has begun to encourage serious research.  In the last ten years great strides have been made in establishing a new evidentiary and interpretative base for what most scholars now consider genocide.  As the centennial of the Armenian Genocide commences, this roundtable explores approaches to understanding its causes, processes, and outcomes from four different disciplines:  history, political science, anthropology, and comparative literature.   Questions continue to rage around the responsibilities of the Ottoman government, the role of ordinary Turks, Kurds, and Circassians in the killings, the relationship of 1915 to the earlier massacres of 1894-1896 and 1909, and the activities of Armenian revolutionaries and the Great Powers.  Thanks for the efforts of the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship, an on-going series of colloquia bringing Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and other scholars together to discuss the tragedies of the late Ottoman period, as well as the work of historians working in Armenian and Ottoman history able to use Ottoman and Armenian sources, major contributions have been made to a new imperial history dealing with the multinational diversity of the Ottoman Empire.   While nationalist interpretations remain powerful, new approaches have complicated the picture of sharply differentiated ethnic and religious communities constantly in conflict.  Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide has contributed as well to the flourishing interdisciplinary and comparative study of genocides, ethnic cleansings, and other varieties of mass killing such as urban riots, purges, and pogroms.