Showing 22 of 22 matching publications (200 total) · catalogue updated 2026-07-22
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Kaiser, Hilmar, 2025
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 5–39 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0061
Building on Raymond Kévorkian's work on the Syrian and Mesopotamian 'destination areas,' Kaiser reconstructs the deportation zone around Rasulain and the Arada Steppe. Officially the Ottoman government claimed it meant to resettle Armenian deportees in the Zor district; in practice deportees were starved, abandoned in the desert, or massacred. Drawing on official Ottoman documentation alongside rare first-hand evidence from the Chechen community of Rasulain, Kaiser shows that district governor Ali Suad Bey began limited relief and settlement projects which central authorities then undid. Local Chechens opposed Armenian settlement on economic grounds, denounced deportees as alleged revolutionaries, and ultimately took a leading part in the massacres.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Tatoyan, Robert, 2025
Ցեղասպանագիտական հանդես / Journal of Genocide Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 8–45 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); ISSN 1829-3980; DOI 10.51442/jgs.0060
Reconstructs how the Armenian death toll was calculated between 1915 and 1923, during and immediately after the extermination campaign. Tatoyan shows the earliest estimates served political and humanitarian ends: publicizing the scale of the Ottoman government's crimes, trying to halt the persecutions, and organizing relief, and that after the war the question resurfaced in diplomatic negotiations over the Armenian Question, chiefly around reparations for human and material losses. Surveying the sources and their methods (Toynbee, Lepsius, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople, and estimates derived from them), he finds the most widely accepted contemporary figure for the main phase to be roughly one million: about 600,000 deaths in the 1915 deportations and massacres, and about 400,000 in 1916 in the Syrian and Mesopotamian camps from starvation, disease, and the killings that followed the camps' dissolution.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Anumyan, Meline, 2025
Պատմություն և մշակույթ / History and Culture, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 103–109 (Yerevan State University); DOI 10.46991/hc.2025.22.1.103
Anumyan takes up a thesis recently circulated by some Turkish historians: that Cemal Pasha, Ottoman Minister of the Navy during the Genocide, was more tolerant toward Armenians than the other Young Turk leaders and opposed the deportations. She isolates four principal propositions supporting that narrative and refutes each in turn. Her conclusion is that although Cemal's stance appears at first glance to differ from that of the other perpetrators, it was in substance identical: his goal too was the elimination of the Armenians as a nation, pursued primarily through assimilation. She argues the rehabilitation of principal architects of the Genocide is dangerous precisely because it can install a groundless image of the 'Armenophile Turk' in Armenian public consciousness.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Khachatryan, Arman, 2025
Archival Science, Vol. 25 (Springer)
Treats Armenian Genocide survivor oral histories as archival resources in their own right: how testimony collections were created, preserved, and institutionalized, and what archival value they carry now that the survivor generation has passed. Bridges genocide studies and archival science in the field's flagship journal.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Stepanyan, Inesa, 2025
Ցեղասպանագիտական հանդես / Journal of Genocide Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 46–63 (AGMI Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/jgs.0059
Traces the evolution of the concept of 'resistance' across the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, spanning organized armed defense, nonviolent opposition, and spiritual, cultural and intellectual efforts to preserve identity. Stepanyan argues for a taxonomy that does not collapse all resistance into armed struggle. She treats the ongoing struggle against denial as a continuation of resistance beyond the temporal boundaries of the genocides themselves.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Seppälä, Serafim, 2025
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 81–101 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0064
Argues that Armenian Genocide survivor memoirs remain an understudied genre despite their value as a grassroots record of the events and of how trauma is remembered. Seppälä brings together two neglected facts: that many memoirs were written by child survivors and dwell on childhood experience, and that religious material (God, faith, prayer, providence) runs all through them. Because most texts were composed decades after the events, the analysis rests on a theory of narrative subjectivity and retrospective narration. The findings emphasize the paradoxical character of survivors' spirituality: after the genocide religious conviction does not cohere into a system but survives as detached fragments, ranging from astonishing faith to deep bitterness.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Hayruni, Ashot, 2024
Հայագիտության հարցեր / Armenological Issues, Vol. 1, No. 1(27), pp. 78–95 (YSU Institute for Armenian Studies); DOI 10.46991/ai.2024.1.27.003
Hayruni reconstructs Johannes Lepsius's resistance to the Armenian Genocide. In summer 1915 Lepsius travelled to Constantinople, gathered materials on the events, and met Ottoman War Minister Enver: failing to dissuade him. Returning to Berlin and finding the German government unwilling to obstruct its ally despite exact knowledge of the extermination policy, he tried to mobilize the two large German churches to pressure the government, also without success; in October 1915 Berlin imposed public and press silence on the Armenian situation, and the churches complied. Lepsius alone refused, breaking with the German Orient Mission he had founded, and privately printed and distributed his confidential report on the situation of the Armenian people to Protestant congregations and Reichstag deputies. He then went into exile in the Netherlands and continued relief work.
BookOpen Access
Kühne, Thomas (ed.) · Rein, Mary Jane (ed.) · Mamigonian, Marc A. (ed.), 2024
Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Studies in the History of Genocide (open access book)
Fully open-access volume honoring Taner Akçam, the first Turkish intellectual to publicly recognize the Armenian Genocide, with fourteen chapters by leading scholars: gendered violence, humanitarianism and refugees, survivor diaries, property spoliation, resistance, and a historiographic survey of the field since the centennial. The entire book PDF is free to download.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Sukiasyan, Robert, 2024
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2024) (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0058
Sukiasyan reconstructs Hasanchelebi as a principal killing station on the Sebastia (Sivas) deportation routes, where deported Armenian men from Sebastia and surrounding regions were systematically exterminated. Drawing on Armenian survivor testimonies corroborated by Ottoman documents, he traces the phases of atrocity — from the plunder and abuse of women to the mass arrest and execution of men — and argues for the distinctive evidentiary value of Armenian-language sources in documenting the machinery of the genocide.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Matosyan, Satenik, 2024
Ցեղասպանագիտական հանդես / Journal of Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 41–56 (AGMI Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/jgs.0056
Aghbak sub-district in Van province contained 36 Armenian villages; Matosyan uses six as case studies to document the massacres, violence and forced deportations of 1914–1915, working predominantly from archival sources. The evidence shows the systematic character of the atrocities and the active involvement of both local Kurdish tribes and Ottoman authorities. She argues Aghbak was targeted for its economic significance and its exposed position on trade routes near the Persian border. The article positions these events among the first genocidal actions undertaken by the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. That is, preceding the canonical April 1915 start date.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Peroomian, Rubina, 2024
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (AGMI, Yerevan)
Examines the Ottoman state's treatment of Armenian orphans (Turkish orphanages, mektebs, and forced placement in Muslim households) as institutions of Turkification meeting the Genocide Convention's definition of intent to destroy a group. Uses survivor interviews, memoirs, and first-person accounts, and traces the transgenerational psychological burden the genocide left on the Armenian nation.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Tatoyan, Robert A., 2024
Ցեղասպանագիտական հանդես / Journal of Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 9–48 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/jgs.0051
Reconstructs an exceptional episode of Armenian self-defense during the second phase of the Genocide: the armed resistance of Zeitun deportees in a caravan driven into the desert after the Der Zor camp was liquidated in summer 1916. Tatoyan works from survivor testimony, above all the unpublished memoir of Tigran Makaryan held in AGMI's holdings, cross-checked against Garegin Hovhannisyan, Nazareth Muradyan and Aram Andonian. He establishes that the resistance broke out in early August 1916 at the Shedadieh camp, triggered by attempted conscription of men into labor battalions, and lasted two or three days before being crushed. Roughly 100–120 Armenian men took part, about a third armed; suppression required 200 mounted gendarmes plus auxiliary bands, and Der Zor governor Salih Zeki directed it personally.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Kazaryan, Anna A., 2024
Ցեղասպանագիտական հանդես / Journal of Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 63–75 (AGMI Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/jgs.0053
Drawing on archival sources, houshamatyans and survivor testimony collections, Kazaryan reconstructs events of 1914–1915 in the Keghi sub-district of Erzerum province. She traces the Ottoman government's persecutory policy against the local Armenians, the methods used to carry out the deportation, the violence inflicted along the route, and the principal massacre sites. Her argument is methodological as well as documentary: studying deportation and annihilation at the level of individual districts, and even single villages, yields a fuller understanding of how the Genocide was actually implemented.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Gatrjian, Avo, 2024
Ցեղասպանագիտական հանդես / Journal of Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 9–40 (AGMI Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/jgs.0055
Examines songs and music produced in multiple languages and periods in and about the Genocide camps along the Euphrates, across folk, rock, metal, rap, jazz, classical and new-age idioms, and traces their transmission into film, graphic series, documentary and theater. The author teaches at Hamazkayin's Armenian Studies Institute in Aleppo.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Parsamyan, Seda A., 2023
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 5–34 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0043
Parsamyan argues that the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Ottoman Empire began with the conquest of Western Armenia and has continued to the present, with Armenian culture repeatedly destroyed outright or 'neutralised' by successive Turkish regimes. The first part reviews how genocide theorists have defined and redefined 'cultural genocide,' including attempts to revise or rename the concept. The second sets out a chronology of the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage. She then gives a detailed account of the demolition policy pursued during the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, assessing whether it is best characterized as vandalism or as cultural genocide.
BookPaywalled
Semerdjian, Elyse, 2023
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2023
Semerdjian offers a feminist history of the Armenian Genocide centered on women and child survivors, taking tattooed and scarred bodies themselves as historical evidence. She argues that gender is pivotal to genocidal thinking, and traces how the Ottoman Armenian community was dis-membered and disfigured, then re-membered by the survivor community in the decades that followed. Rather than relying only on state archives, the book assembles what Semerdjian calls embodied archives: bodies and voices, remnants and fragments, recovered from archival scraps and personal memories. Through them she reconstructs the experiences of Armenian women absorbed into Muslim households, marked with tattoos, and later reclaimed or remembered by their community. The approach recovers voices historically silenced in both Ottoman and conventional scholarly records. The book won the 2024 AMEWS Book Award of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Galustyan, Regina, 2022
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (AGMI, Yerevan)
Traces the intellectual roots of the racial nationalism that drove the Committee of Union and Progress (Young Turks) toward genocide. Shows how European thinkers (Gobineau, Le Bon, Vambery, Cahun, von der Goltz) shaped CUP ideologists seeking to convert a multi-ethnic empire into a Turkish nation-state. Draws on Ottoman, Armenian, and European sources to map how social Darwinism and pan-Turkism entered CUP thinking.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Levenson, Lance, 2021
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2021), pp. 54–73 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0023
This ethnographic study examines how Armenian youth in Jerusalem construct their identities through inherited historical trauma and the pressures of contemporary conflict. Levenson draws on extended fieldwork at Jerusalem's Armenian school and participation in community life to trace how the genocide functions as the central axis of collective self-understanding, with young people declaring that everything in their lives connects back to it. The article shows how commemorative practices and diaspora activism become sites where inherited memory is actively reworked rather than passively received. Levenson demonstrates that memories are reinterpreted to construct novel identity narratives tied to an imagined Armenian transnation linking Jerusalem's small community to the global diaspora. The study contributes an unusually intimate portrait of one of the oldest continuous Armenian diaspora communities at a moment of demographic strain.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Grigoryan, Hasmik, 2021
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 40–52 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0022
Grigoryan asks whether the ways Armenians obtained food during the Genocide can be classified as unarmed resistance, tracing how that concept was formed in Holocaust scholarship. She frames the question against the persistent charge that Armenians were 'slaughtered like sheep,' arguing instead for a scholarly taxonomy of resistance. She then groups the food-procurement practices attested in survivor memoirs and oral histories: feeding on wild grasses, gathering fruits and nuts, and begging. She pays particular attention to children's experiences, reading these daily acts as conscious struggle against a genocidal policy of death by starvation.
BookPaywalled
Kurt, Ümit, 2021
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2021, 400 pp., ISBN 9780674247949
Kurt, a scholar born in Aintab itself, reconstructs how the city was transformed from a prosperous, mixed place with a thriving Armenian commercial class into a homogeneously Turkish one. His central argument is that the prospect of material gain was a key motivator of local Muslim support for the Armenian Genocide, particularly among the provincial gentry. The book traces the confiscation of Armenian property and the displacement of Armenian merchants, manufacturers, and traders, showing how their wealth was systematically redistributed to local elites, landowners, officials, and merchants. Kurt then follows that expropriated Armenian capital forward, contending that it helped finance the nationalist movement that built the modern Turkish republic. The study rests on an unusually wide source base: Armenian, Ottoman, Turkish, British, and French archives, memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts, and newly discovered property-liquidation records. The result is a provincial-level anatomy of genocide that connects mass violence directly to wealth transfer and state formation.
BookPaywalled
Mouradian, Khatchig, 2021
Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2021, ISBN 9781611863949
Mouradian writes the history of an underground network of humanitarians, missionaries, and diplomats in Ottoman Syria who helped save thousands of Armenian lives during the genocide. The book directly challenges the conventional image of Armenians as passive victims, documenting instead how deportees and their allies organized relief, shelter, and rescue in the very region chosen for their annihilation. Drawing on extensive primary sources, Mouradian maps the system of concentration and transit camps across Ottoman Syria and follows how aid moved through and around them. He argues that unarmed, humanitarian resistance proved an important factor in saving countless lives, and that the genocide did not proceed unopposed even at its epicenter. The result is a social history of Der Zor and the Syrian deserts told from the perspective of those who organized survival. It reframes resistance during the genocide to include feeding, hiding, healing, and record-keeping alongside armed defense.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Krzysztan, Bartłomiej, 2021
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (AGMI, Yerevan)
Asks how the two defining narratives of modern Armenian identity, the Genocide and the Karabakh conflict, are linked in Armenian political discourse. Using discourse analysis, expert interviews, questionnaires, and ethnographic fieldwork, shows how historical analogy binds the two traumas into a single memory framework shaping nation- and state-building in post-Soviet Armenia.
