SUMMARY:

“Dialogue on Genocide: Efforts by Armenian and Turkish Scholars to Understand the Deportations and Massacres of Armenians During World War I” presents R. Suny’s reflections on his efforts to initiate a Turkish-Armenian academic dialogue. The project started as a lecture he gave at Koз University, during which he saw that at least some Turks were beginning to rethink the unthinkable: to question their own nation’s past in order to make possible a more acceptable future. Suny’s initiative as well as his publications on the history of the 1915 Genocide provoked strong criticism from both Armenian and Turkish journalists and scholars. Next came the discussion of Suny’s reading of the Genocide in the journal The Armenian Forum, where three historians – two of Turkish origin, one of Armenian – got an opportunity to critique his article “Empire and Nation: Armenians, Turks, and the End of the Ottoman Empire,” based on his talk in Istanbul. In the article, and in his responses to all three scholars, Suny argued that his treatment of the events of 1915 was an attempt at an explanation that moves beyond the usual understanding of deep-seated Turkish racism, Armenian provocation, an imputed civil war, or a clash of nationalisms. It was a plea for a kind of enriched, thickly described, empirically-grounded study of the Genocide that had largely eluded us in the past. Employing some of the recent discussions of empire, nation, and identity-formation, he was trying to free the discussion from the constraints of the nationalist paradigms that had distorted older accounts. “Dialogue on Genocide” traces the success of this project by evaluating the discussions that took place at three workshops bringing together Armenian, Turkish, and other scholars: “Armenians and the End of the Ottoman Empire” (Chicago, March 17-19, 2000); “Contextualizing the Armenian Experience in the Ottoman Empire: From the Balkan Wars to the New Turkish Republic” (University of Michigan, March 8-10, 2002); the third Armenian-Turkish workshop (University of Minnesota, March 28-30, 2003).
Thus, what had been an untouchable topic in the late 1990s had by 2002 become an acceptable, legitimate subject for discussion in the academic community and more broadly in the Armenian-American community.