Journal ArticleOpen Access
O'Brien, Melanie, 2025
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 76–102 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan); special issue 'Law, Activism and the International Recognition of the Armenian Genocide'; DOI 10.51442/ijags.0071
Drawing on her own experience lobbying the Australian federal government, O'Brien traces the history of Armenian Genocide recognition in Australia and the obstacles to it. She analyzes the geopolitical and historical barriers: above all Australia's relationship with Turkey dating to the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, and the weight of Gallipoli in Australian military memory and national identity. She then examines the Joint Justice Initiative, the Armenian-Assyrian-Greek coalition through which she works to overcome those barriers. The article situates scholarship inside advocacy, arguing that academia is an active participant in the fight for political change rather than a bystander to it.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Vardanyan, Gevorg · Hakobyan, Narine, 2025
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 54–80 (Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0063
Examines Ottoman denial of the Hamidian massacres (1894–1896) inside the United States, centered on Ottoman Minister Alexander Mavroyeni Bey and his collaborators. The Ottoman legation in Washington reframed reports of anti-Armenian violence as justified responses to 'sedition,' and the authors argue this was not merely exported internal propaganda but a distinct transnational strategy built for American audiences. Mavroyeni Bey drew analogies to US treatment of Native Americans, appealed to American sovereignty, and worked with the American Muslim convert Alexander Russell Webb to delegitimize Armenian-American activism and discredit missionaries. Armenian-Americans were the campaign's primary target because of their grassroots organizing and their influence on humanitarian mobilization. The study pushes the history of denial back from 1915 into the Hamidian era.
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
Matiossian, Vartan, 2022
International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 26–48 (AGMI, Yerevan); DOI 10.51442/ijags.0028
Matiossian traces the genealogy of the word yeghern and the shift of its primary meaning from 'evil' to 'crime,' 'massacre' and 'genocide' over the past century and a half. He shows that a nineteenth-century learned conflation of the Classical Armenian homophones yeghern (crime) and yegher (lamentation) produced the secondary sense 'tragedy, calamity,' collapsing cause and consequence into one word. Because yeghern is used only with active verbs, he argues, it indicates cause and points to the perpetrator. That ambiguity was then exploited in Turkey and the United States, with interpretive denial adopting 'Medz Yeghern' precisely to avoid the word 'genocide' by rendering it 'Great Catastrophe.' He proposes the correct literal translation is 'Great Crime.'
