World War I was a watershed, a defining moment, in Armenian history. Its effects were unprecedented in that it resulted in what no other war, invasion, or occupation had achieved in three thousand years of identifiable Armenian existence. This calamity was the physical elimination of the Armenian people and most of the evidence of their ever having lived on the great Armenian Plateau, to which the perpetrator side soon gave the new name of Eastern Anatolia. The bearers of an impressive martial and cultural history, the Armenians had also known repeated trials and tribulations, waves of massacre, captivity, and exile, but even in the darkest of times there had always been enough remaining to revive, rebuild, and go forward.

This third volume in a series edited by Richard Hovannisian, the dean of Armenian historians, provides a unique fusion of the history, philosophy, literature, art, music, and educational aspects of the Armenian experience. It further provides a rich storehouse of information on comparative dimensions of the Armenian genocide in relation to the Assyrian, Greek and Jewish situations, and beyond that, paradoxes in American and French policy responses to the Armenian genocides. The volume concludes with a trio of essays concerning fundamental questions of historiography and politics that either make possible or can inhibit reconciliation of ancient truths and righting ancient wrongs.

"A compelling read." Richard J. Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor of the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda "A very important contribution." Princeton N. Lyman, Council on Foreign Relations "A powerful reminder that dealing with the legacy of wartime atrocities is not simply a matter of bringing perpetrators to justice. It also means overcoming the divisions within the society and healing the victims." Marina Ottaway, Senior Associate, Democracy and Rule of Law Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace In Amnesty after Atrocity? veteran journalist Helena Cobban examines the effectiveness of different ways of dealing with the aftermath of genocide and violence committed during intergroup conflicts. She traveled to Rwanda, Mozambique, and South Africa to assess the various ways those nations tried to come to grips with their violent past: from war crimes trials to truth commissions to outright amnesties for perpetrators. She discovered that in terms of both moving forward and satisfying the needs of survivors, war crimes trials are not the most effective path. This book provides historical context and includes interviews with a cross-section of people: community leaders, victims, policymakers, teachers, rights activists, and even some former abusers. These first-person accounts create a rich, readable text, and Cobban's overall conclusions will surprise many readers in the West.

"Investigating Genocide: An Analysis of the Dafur Atrocities Documentation Project" will be comprised of over 1,000 annotations on a wide array of issues/ topics germane to the subject of the intervention and prevention of genocide. Among the topics under which annotations will be included are: key conventions, international treaties, and covenants; early warning signals and forecasting; key "risk data bases"; sanctions; peace-keeping forces armed intervention; humanitarian intervention; conflict resolution; genocide early-warning systems/monitoring; ad hoc tribunals; the International Criminal Court; realpolitik vis-a-vis the issue of genocide prevention and intervention; key non-governmental agencies working on the issue of intervention and prevention of genocide; and key governmental and U.N. bodies working on the issue of genocide intervention and prevention.
In addition to the annotations, the book will include a major essay that introduces the reader to the subject of intervention and prevention of genocide. It will raise a host of critical issues regarding the strengths, weakness, and limitations of various approaches germane to issues of intervention and prevention.
In a companion volume, "The UN and the Intervention and Prevention of Genocide: A critical Bibliography," will provide a comprehensive annotation of the voluminous writings relating to the role of the UN in the prevention of genocide. This volume is especially pertinent has the UN has come under increasing fire in both the media as well as the scholarly literature for its inaction in the face of genocide.

This book deals with literary representations of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. The focus is a transnational, polyphonic writing project entitled 'Rwanda: ecrire par devoir de memoire' (Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory), undertaken in 1998 by a group of nine African authors. This work emphasizes the Afropolitan cultural frame in which the texts were conceived and written. Instead of using Western and Eurocentric tropes, this volume looks at a so-called 'minority trauma': an African conflict situated in a collectivist society and written about by writers from African origin. This approach enables a more situated study, in which it becomes possible to draw out the local notions of ubuntu, oral testimonies, mourning traditions, healing and storytelling strategies, and the presence of the 'invisible'. As these texts are written in French and to date not all of them have been translated into English, most academic research has been done in French. This book thus assists in connecting English-speaking readers not only to a set of texts written in French with significant literary and cultural value, but also to francophone trauma studies research.

This volume deals with aspects of genocide in Rwandaand Cambodia that have been largely unexplored to date, including the impact of regional politics and the role played by social institutions in perpetrating genocide. Although the "story" of the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and that of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 have been written about in detail, most have focused on how the genocides took place, what the ideas and motives were that led extremist factions to attempt to kill whole sections of their country's population, and who their victims were. This volume builds on our understanding of genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda by bringing new issues, sources, and approaches into focus.

The chapters in this book are grouped so that a single theme DEGREESs explored in both the Cambodian and Rwandan contexts; their ordering is designed to facilitate comparative analysis. The first three chapters emphasize the importance of political discourse in the genocidal process. Chapters 4 and 5 examine social institutions and explore their role in the genocidal process. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the military trajectories of the genocidal regimes in Cambodia and Rwanda after their overthrow, showing that genocide and genocidal intents as a political program do not cease the moment the massacres subside. The final chapters deal with private and public efforts to memorialize the genocides in the months and years following the killing.

Drawing on ten years of genocide studies at Yale, this excellent anthology assembles high-quality new research from a variety of continents, disciplines, and languages. It will be an important addition to ongoing research on genocide.

This book comprises 14 essays by scholars who disagree about the methods and purposes of comparing Nazism and Communism. The central idea is that if these two different memories of evil were to develop in isolation, their competition for significance would distort the real evils both movements propagated. Whilst many reject this comparison because they feel it could relativize the evil of one of these movements, the claim that a political movement is uniquely evil can only be made by comparing it to another movement. How do these issues affect postwar interrelations between memory and history? Are there tensions between the ways postwar societies remember these atrocities, and the ways in which intellectuals and scholars reconstruct what happened? Nazism and Communism have been constantly compared since the 1920s. A sense of the ways in which these comparisons have been used and abused by both Right and Left belongs to our common history. These twentieth century evils invite comparison, if only because of their traumatic effects. We have an obligation to understand what happened, and we also have an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.

This book comprises 14 essays by scholars who disagree about the methods and purposes of comparing Nazism and Communism. The central idea is that if these two different memories of evil were to develop in isolation, their competition for significance would distort the real evils both movements propagated. Whilst many reject this comparison because they feel it could relativize the evil of one of these movements, the claim that a political movement is uniquely evil can only be made by comparing it to another movement. How do these issues affect postwar interrelations between memory and history? Are there tensions between the ways postwar societies remember these atrocities, and the ways in which intellectuals and scholars reconstruct what happened? Nazism and Communism have been constantly compared since the 1920s. A sense of the ways in which these comparisons have been used and abused by both Right and Left belongs to our common history. These twentieth century evils invite comparison, if only because of their traumatic effects. We have an obligation to understand what happened, and we also have an obligation to understand how we have dealt with it.

The "What Works" initiative is having a profound impact on the work of the National Probation Service in the UK, and much has been invested in new accredited programs - both in terms of the numbers of offenders planned to complete these programs and their anticipated impact upon offending. Yet there has been little scholarly or professional discussion of the nature and risks of the new paradigm. It is important that it is subjected to critical debate and scrutiny. This book provides a critical overview of what works, providing a wider set of perspectives on a project which is vital for the future of the National Probation Service. It has the following objectives: to assess critically the claims of the "What Works" initiative; to examine the foundations upon which "What Works" is based; to demonstrate the limitations of the "What Works" initiative as currently conceived; and to begin the process of constructing an alternative vision for the National Probation Service.

This book offers a novel sociological examination of the historical trajectories of Burundi and Rwanda. It challenges both the Eurocentric assumptions which have underpinned many sociological theorisations of modernity, and the notion that the processes of modernisation move gradually, if precariously, towards more peaceable forms of cohabitation within and between societies. Addressing these themes at critical historical junctures - precolonial, colonial and postcolonial - the book argues that the recent experiences of extremely violent social conflict in Burundi and Rwanda cannot be seen as an 'object apart' from the concerns of sociologists, as it is commonly presented. Instead, these experiences are situated within a specific route to and through modernity, one 'entangled' with Western modernity. A contribution to an emerging global historical sociology, Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide will appeal to scholars of sociology and social theory with interests in postcolonialism, historical sociology, multiple modernities and genocide.

Genocide is a topic beset by ambiguities over meaning and double standards. In this stimulating and gripping history, William Rubinstein sets out to clarify the meaning of the term genocide and its historical evolution, and provides a working definition that informs the rest of the book. He makes the important argument that each instance of genocide is best understood within a particular historical framework and provides an original chronology of these distinct frameworks. In the final part of the book he critically examines a number of alleged past and recent genocides: from native Americans, slavery, the Irish famine, homosexuals and gypsies in the Nazi concentration camps, Yugoslavia, Rwanda through to the claims of pro-lifers and anti-abortionists.

Warrant for Genocide provides a unique, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the underlying causes of the World War I Armenian genocide. It traces genocide to the origin and history of the long-standing Turko-Armenian discord with the massacres treated as a means to resolve the conflict between a powerful, dominant group and a weak, vulnerable minority.

The World War I destruction of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire was neither an accident nor an aberration. The seeds of the large-scale deportations and massacres of Armenians can be found in the 1919u1920 Turkish Courts Martial documents of leaders of the Young Turk Ittihadist regime. These were replete with xenophobic nationalism, calls for the use of arms to achieve that end, and references to Islam to incite the masses against Armenians. The utmost secrecy, camouflage, and deflection with respect to their plans were evident in what was not said. This was a drastic departure by the regime from its publicly proclaimed posture of egalitarianism, heralding the dawn of a new era of multiethnic harmony and accord in the decaying empire.

Dadrian carefully details these calculated deliberations and the concomitant shift from Ottomanism to Turkism in the radical wing of the regime. He illustrates how this rekindled enmities between dominant Turks and subject minorities. The desire to neutralize or eliminate the opposition helped pave the way to a new and radical nationality policy. To Dadrian, the act of genocide was a draconian method of resolving a lingering conflict.

No analysis of the Armenian genocide can be adequate without understanding the origin, elements, evolution, and escalation of the Turko-Armenian conflict. Dadrian details this admirably, showing that in the final analysis, the Armenian genocide was a cataclysmic by-product of this conflict. Genocide and Holocaust scholars, Armenian area specialists, and human rights activists will consider this an essential addition to the literature.

Human Rights after Hitler reveals thousands of forgotten US and Allied war crimes prosecutions against Hitler and other Axis war criminals based on a popular movement for justice that stretched from Poland to the Pacific. These cases provide a great foundation for twenty-first-century human rights and accompany the achievements of the Nuremberg trials and postwar conventions. They include indictments of perpetrators of the Holocaust made while the death camps were still operating, which confounds the conventional wisdom that there was no official Allied response to the Holocaust at the time. This history also brings long overdue credit to the United Nations' War Crimes Commission (UNWCC), which operated during and after World War II. Dan Plesch describes the commission's work and Washington's bureaucratic obstruction to a 1944 proposal to prosecute crimes against humanity before an international criminal court. From the 1940s until a recent lobbying effort by Plesch and colleagues, the UNWCC's files were kept out of public view in the UN archives under pressure from the US government. The book answers why the commission and its files were closed and reveals that the lost precedents set by these cases have enormous practical utility for prosecuting war crimes today. They cover US and Allied prosecutions of torture, including "water treatment," wartime sexual assault, and crimes by foot soldiers who were "just following orders." Plesch's book will fascinate anyone with an interest in the history of the Second World War as well as provide ground-breaking revelations for historians and human rights practitioners alike.

The war in Kosovo has been a defining moment in post-Cold War Europe. Kosovo has great importance beyond the Balkans as the most ambitious attempt of the international community to prevent internal conflicts and rebuild a society destroyed by war and ethnic cleansing. As the danger of ethnic conflict prevails in the region and elsewhere around the world, the experience of Kosovo offers important lessons. This is a comprehensive survey of developments in Kosovo leading up to, during and after the war in 1999, providing additionally the international and regional framework to the conflict. It examines the underlying causes of the war, the attempts by the international community to intervene, and the war itself in spring 1999. It critically examines the international administration in Kosovo since June 1999 and contextualizes it within the relations of Kosovo to its neighbours and as part of the larger European strategy in Southeastern Europe with the stability pact. It does not seek to promote one interpretation of the conflict and its aftermath, but brings together a range of intellectual arguments from some sixteen researchers from the Balkans, the rest of Europe and North America.

The fact that Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Rwanda cast ominous shadows forward into the future compels us to confront these horrific results of the human head, heart, and hand. In Genocidal Temptation, Robert Frey presents a compelling, integrated focus directed toward the Nazi killing programs, American atomic bombings in Japan, Tutsi massacres in Rwanda, Soviet genocide in Lithuania, and other mass killing and repression programs.

The decades separating our new century from the Armenian Genocide, the prototype of modern-day nation-killings, have fundamentally changed the political composition of the region. Virtually no Armenians remain on their historic territories in what is today eastern Turkey. The Armenian people have been scattered about the world. And a small independent republic has come to replace the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was all that was left of the homeland as the result of Turkish invasion and Bolshevik collusion in 1920. One element has remained constant. Notwithstanding the eloquent, compelling evidence housed in the United States National Archives and repositories around the world, successive Turkish governments have denied that the predecessor Young Turk regime committed genocide, and, like the Nazis who followed their example, sought aggressively to deflect blame by accusing the victims themselves.

This volume argues that the time has come for Turkey to reassess the propriety of its approach, and to begin the process that will allow it move into a post-genocide era. The work includes "Genocide: An Agenda for Action," Gijs M. de Vries; "Determinants of the Armenian Genocide," Donald Bloxham; "Looking Backward and Forward," Joyce Apsel; "The United States Response to the Armenian Genocide," Simon Payaslian; "The League of Nations and the Reclamation of Armenian Genocide Survivors," Vahram L. Shemmassian; "Raphael Lemkin and the Armenian Genocide," Steven L. Jacobs; "Reconstructing Turkish Historiography of the Armenian Massacres and Deaths of 1915," Fatma Muge Gocek; "Bitter-Sweet Memories; "The Armenian Genocide and International Law," Joe Verhoeven; "New Directions in Literary Response to the Armenian Genocide," Rubina Peroomian; "Denial and Free Speech," Henry C. Theriault; "Healing and Reconciliation," Ervin Staub; "State and Nation," Raffi K. Hovannisian.

Genocide is one of the most heinous abuses of human rights imaginable, yet reaction to it by European governments in the post-Cold War world has been criticised for not matching the severity of the crime. European governments rarely agree on whether to call a situation genocide, and their responses to purported genocides have often been limited to delivering humanitarian aid to victims and supporting prosecution of perpetrators in international criminal tribunals. More coercive measures - including sanctions or military intervention - are usually rejected as infeasible or unnecessary. This book explores the European approach to genocide, reviewing government attitudes towards the negotiation and ratification of the 1948 Genocide Convention and analysing responses to purported genocides since the end of the Second World War. Karen E. Smith considers why some European governments were hostile to the Genocide Convention and why European governments have been reluctant to use the term genocide to describe atrocities ever since.

This volume, newly published in paperback, is part of a comprehensive effort by R. J. Rummel to understand and place in historical perspective the entire subject of genocide and mass murder, or what he calls democide. It is the fifth in a series of volumes in which he offers a detailed analysis of the 120,000,000 people killed as a result of government action or direct intervention.

In Power Kills, Rummel offers a realistic and practical solution to war, democide, and other collective violence. As he states it, "The solution...is to foster democratic freedom and to democratize coercive power and force. That is, mass killing and mass murder carried out by government is a result of indiscriminate, irresponsible Power at the center."

Rummel observes that well-established democracies do not make war on and rarely commit lesser violence against each other. The more democratic two nations are, the less likely is war or smaller-scale violence between them. The more democratic a nation is, the less severe its overall foreign violence, the less likely it will have domestic collective violence, and the less its democide. Rummel argues that the evidence supports overwhelmingly the most important fact of our time: democracy is a method of nonviolence.

From the early efforts that emerged in the struggle against Nazism, and over the past half century, the field of genocide studies has grown in reach to include five genocide centers across the globe and well over one hundred Holocaust centers. This work enables a new generation of scholars, researchers, and policymakers to assess the major foci of the field, develop ways and means to intervene and prevent future genocides, and review the successes and failures of the past.

The contributors to Pioneers of Genocide Studies approach the questions of greatest relevance in a personal way, crafting a statement that reveals one's individual voice, persuasions, literary style, scholarly perspectives, and relevant details of one's life. The book epitomizes scholarly autobiographical writing at its best. The book also includes the most important works by each author on the issue of genocide.

Among the contributors are experts in the Armenian, Bosnian, and Cambodian genocides, as well as the Holocaust against the Jewish people. The contributors are Rouben Adalian, M. Cherif Bassiouni, Israel W. Charney, Vahakn Dadrian, Helen Fein, Barbara Harff, David Hawk, Herbert Hirsch, Irving Louis Horowitz, Richard Hovannisian, Henry Huttenbach, Leo Kuper, Raphael Lemkin, James E. Mace, Eric Markusen, Robert Melson, R.J. Rummel, Roger W. Smith, Gregory H. Stanton, Ervin Staub, Colin Tatz, Yves Ternan, and the co-editors. The work represents a high watermark in the reflections and self-reflections on the comparative study of genocide.

Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Book Prize for Holocaust Research "A substantive contribution to the history of ethnic strife and extreme violence" (The Wall Street Journal) and a cautionary examination of how genocide can take root at the local level--turning neighbors, friends, and family against one another--as seen through the eastern European border town of Buczacz during World War II. For more than four hundred years, the Eastern European border town of Buczacz--today part of Ukraine--was home to a highly diverse citizenry. It was here that Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews all lived side by side in relative harmony. Then came World War II, and three years later the entire Jewish population had been murdered by German and Ukrainian police, while Ukrainian nationalists eradicated Polish residents. In truth, though, this genocide didn't happen so quickly. In Anatomy of a Genocide, Omer Bartov explains that ethnic cleansing doesn't occur as is so often portrayed in popular history, with the quick ascent of a vitriolic political leader and the unleashing of military might. It begins in seeming peace, slowly and often unnoticed, the culmination of pent-up slights and grudges and indignities. The perpetrators aren't just sociopathic soldiers. They are neighbors and friends and family. They are also middle-aged men who come from elsewhere, often with their wives and children and parents, and settle into a life of bourgeois comfort peppered with bouts of mass murder. For more than two decades Bartov, whose mother was raised in Buczacz, traveled extensively throughout the region, scouring archives and amassing thousands of documents rarely seen until now. He has also made use of hundreds of first-person testimonies by victims, perpetrators, collaborators, and rescuers. Anatomy of a Genocide profoundly changes our understanding of the social dynamics of mass killing and the nature of the Holocaust as a whole. Bartov's book isn't just an attempt to understand what happened in the past. It's a warning of how it could happen again, in our own towns and cities--much more easily than we might think.

Taking Lives is a pivotal effort to reconstruct the social and political contexts of twentieth century, state-inspired mass murder. Irving Louis Horowitz re-examines genocide from a new perspective -- viewing this issue as the defining element in the political sociology of our time. The fifth edition includes approximately 30 percent new materials with five new chapters. The work is divided into five parts: "Present as History Past as Prologue, " "Future as Memory, " "Toward A General Theory of State-Sponsored Crime, " "Studying Genocide." The new edition concludes with chapters reviewing the natural history of genocide studies from 1945 to the present, along with a candid self-appraisal of the author's work in this field over four decades.

Taking Lives asserts that genocide is not a sporadic or random event, nor is it necessarily linked to economic development or social progress. Genocide is a special sort of mass destruction conducted with the approval of the state apparatus. Life and death issues are uniquely fundamental, since they alone serve as a precondition for the examination of all other issues. Such concerns move us beyond abstract, formalist frameworks into new ways of viewing the social study of the human condition. Nearly all reviewers of earlier editions have recognized this. Taking Lives is a fundamental work for political scientists, sociologists, and all those concerned with the state's propensity toward evil.

For the past half century, the Indonesian military has depicted the 1965-66 killings, which resulted in the murder of approximately one million unarmed civilians, as the outcome of a spontaneous uprising. This formulation not only denied military agency behind the killings, it also denied that the killings could ever be understood as a centralised, nation-wide campaign. Using documents from the former Indonesian Intelligence Agency's archives in Banda Aceh this book shatters the Indonesian government's official propaganda account of the mass killings and proves the military's agency behind those events. This book tells the story of the 3,000 pages of top-secret documents that comprise the Indonesian genocide files. Drawing upon these orders and records, along with the previously unheard stories of 70 survivors, perpetrators, and other eyewitness of the genocide in Aceh province it reconstructs, for the first time, a detailed narrative of the killings using the military's own accounts of these events. This book makes the case that the 1965-66 killings can be understood as a case of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention. The first book to reconstruct a detailed narrative of the genocide using the army's own records of these events, it will be of interest to students and academics in the field of Southeast Asian Studies, History, Politics, the Cold War, Political Violence and Comparative Genocide.

The Great Lakes region of Africa has seen dramatic changes. After a decade of war, repression, and genocide, loosely allied regimes have replaced old-style dictatorships. The Path of a Genocide examines the decade (1986-97) that brackets the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This collection of essays is both a narrative of that event and a deep reexamination of the international role in addressing humanitarian issues and complex emergencies.

Nineteen donor countries and seventeen multilateral organizations, international agencies, and international nongovernmental organizations pooled their efforts for an in-depth evaluation of the international response to the conflict in Rwanda. Original studies were commissioned from scholars from Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire, Ethiopia, Norway, Great Britain, France, Canada, and the United States. While each chapter in this volume focuses on one dimension of the Rwanda conflict, together they tell the story of this unfolding genocide and the world's response.

The Path of a Genocide offers readers a perspective in sharp contrast to the tendency to treat a peace agreement as the end to conflict. This is a detailed effort to make sense of the political crisis and genocide in Rwanda and the effects it had on its neighbors.

In Indonesia, the events of 1st October 1965 were followed by a campaign to annihilate the Communist Party and its alleged sympathisers. It resulted in the murder of an estimate of one million people - a genocide that counts as one of the largest mass murders after WWII - and the incarceration of another million, many of them for a decade or more without any legal process. This drive was justified and enabled by a propaganda campaign in which communists were painted as atheist, hypersexual, amoral and intent to destroy the nation. To date, the effects of this campaign are still felt, and the victims are denied the right of association and freedom of speech. This book presents the history of the genocide and propaganda campaign and the process towards the International People's Tribunal on 1965 crimes against humanity in Indonesia (IPT 1965), which was held in November 2015 in The Hague, The Netherlands. The authors, an Indonesian Human Rights lawyer and a Dutch academic examine this unique event, which for the first time brings these crimes before an international court, and its verdict. They single out the campaign of hate propaganda as it provided the incitement to kill so many Indonesians and why this propaganda campaign is effective to this day. The first book on this topic, it fills a significant gap in Asian Studies and Genocide Studies.

How has human response to genocide evolved over time? What effect has it had on our understanding of the cause and consequences of genocide? Spanning 2,800 years of human history, A Cultural History of Genocide offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary overview of genocide from ancient times to the present day. With six highly illustrated volumes all written by leading scholars, this is the definitive reference work on the subject of genocide. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six. The six volumes cover: 1. - Ancient World (800 BCE - 800 CE); 2. - Middle Ages (800 - 1400); 3. - Early Modern World (1400 - 1789); 4. - Long Nineteenth Century (1789 - 1914); 5. - Era of Total War (1914 - 1945); 6. - Modern World (1945 - present). Themes (and chapter titles) are: Responses to Genocide; Motivations and Justifications for Genocide; Genocide Perpetrators; Genocide Victims; Genocide and Memory; Consequences of Genocide; Representations of Genocide; Causes of Genocide. The page extent for the pack is approximately 1,720 pp with c. 240 illustrations. Each volume opens with Notes on Contributors and an Introduction and concludes with Notes, Bibliography, and an Index. The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Genocide is part of The Cultural Histories series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully searchable digital library available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com).

Is the Armenian Genocide a strictly historical matter? If that is the case, why is it still a topical issue, capable of causing diplomatic rows and heated debates? The short answer would be that the century old Armenian Genocide is much more than a historical question. It emerged as a political dilemma on the international arena at the San Stefano peace conference in 1878 and has remained as such into our days. The disparity between knowledge and acknowledgement, mainly ascribable to Turkey's official denial of the genocide, has only heightened the politicization of the Armenian question. Thus, the memories of the WWI era refuse to be relegated to the pages of history but are rather perceived as a vivid presence. This is the result of the perpetual process of politics of memory. The politics of memory is an intricate and interdisciplinary negotiation, engaging many different actors in the society who have access to a wide range of resources and measures in order to achieve their goals. By following the Armenian question during the past century up to its Centennial Commemoration in 2015, this study aims to explain why and how the politics of memory of the Armenian Genocide has kept it as a topical issue in our days.