DENIAL OF VIOLENCE, BY FATMA MUGE GOCEK

March 24, 2015

Fatma Muge Gocek

While much of the international community regards the forced
deportation of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where
approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide,
the Turkish state still officially denies it.

In Denial of Violence, Fatma Muge Gocek seeks to decipher the roots
of this disavowal. To capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to
denial, Gocek undertook a qualitative analysis of 315 memoirs published
in Turkey from 1789 to 2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources,
journals, and newspapers. She argues that denial is a multi-layered,
historical process with four distinct yet overlapping components:
the structural elements of collective violence and situated modernity
on one side, and the emotional elements of collective emotions and
legitimating events on the other. In the Turkish case, denial emerged
through four stages: (i) the initial imperial denial of the origins
of the collective violence committed against the Armenians commenced
in 1789 and continued until 1907; (ii) the Young Turk denial of the
act of violence lasted for a decade from 1908 to 1918; (iii) early
republican denial of the actors of violence took place from 1919 to
1973; and (iv) the late republican denial of the responsibility for
the collective violence started in 1974 and continues today.

Denial of Violence develops a novel theoretical, historical and
methodological framework to understanding what happened and why the
denial of collective violence against Armenians still persists within
Turkish state and society.

Fatma Muge Gocek

Fatma Muge Gocek is a Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies. Her
research focuses on the comparative analysis of history, politics
and gender in the first and third worlds. She critically analyzes
the impact of processes such as development, nationalism, religious
movements and collective violence on minorities. Her published works
includesEast Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the
18th Century (Oxford University Press, 1987), Reconstructing Gender
in the Middle East: Tradition, Identity, Power (Columbia University
Press, 1994 co-edited with Shiva Balaghi), Rise of the Bourgeoisie,
Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford
University Press, 1996), Political Cartoons in the Middle East
(Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998), Social Constructions of Nationalism
in the Middle East (SUNY Press, 2002), The Transformation of Turkey:
Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era
(I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2011), and A Question of Genocide: Armenians
and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford University Press,
2011 co-edited with Ronald Grigor Suny and Norman Naimark).