The book represents an earthquake in genocide studies, particularly in the field of Armenian Genocide research. A unique feature of the Armenian Genocide has been the long-standing efforts of successive Turkish governments to deny its historicity and to hide the documentary evidencesurrounding it. This book provides a major clarification of the often blurred lines between facts and truth in regard to these events. The authenticity of the killing orders signed by Ottoman Interior Minister Talat Pasha and the memoirs of the Ottoman bureaucrat Naim Efendi have been two of the most contested topics in this regard. The denialist school has long argued that these documents and memoirs were all forgeries, produced by Armenians to further their claims. Taner Akçam provides the evidence to refute the basis of these claims and demonstrates clearly why the documents can be trusted as authentic, revealing the genocidal intent of the Ottoman-Turkish government towards its Armenian population. As such, this work removes a cornerstone from the denialist edifice, and further establishes the historicity of the Armenian Genocide.

An analysis of the Turkish position regarding the Armenian claims of genocide during World War I and the continuing debate over this issue, the author offers an equal examination of each side's historical position. The book asks "what is genocide?" and illustrates that although this is a useful concept to describe such evil events as the Jewish Holocaust in World War II and Rwanda in the 1990s, the term has also been overused, misused, and therefore trivialized by many different groups seeking to demonize their antagonists and win sympathetic approbation for them. The author includes the Armenians in this category because, although as many as 600,000 of them died during World War I, it was neither a premeditated policy perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government nor an event unilaterally implemented without cause. Of course, in no way does this excuse the horrible excesses committed by the Turks.

Avoiding the sterile "was-it-genocide-or-not" debate, this book will open a new chapter in this contentious controversy and may help achieve a long-overdue reconciliation of Armenians and Turks.

A fresh look at the forgotten genocide of world history.

Legislating Reality and Politicizing History: Contextualizing Armenian Claims of Genocide is the first in-depth study of Armenian and Armenian Diaspora identity viewed via the prism of a historical trauma. Though numerous attempts to define a larger Armenian identity through history, language and/or religion have been performed, no major study has demonstrated the centrality of the events of 1915 to this identity and the formation of Self and Other. The book demonstrates how the Armenian campaign to have the events of 1915 recognized as the Armenian Genocide, flawed and racist as the campaign may be, remains the single bond possessing enough strength to bind the otherwise linguistic, geographically and religiously diverse Armenian Diaspora communities together. Utilizing a quantitative and comparative approach, peppered with International Relations theory and the political economy of lobbying (niche theory), this book demonstrates the pervasiveness and political power of the re-imagined trauma of 1915 to Armenian large group identity. This identity, divorced by time and space from historical realities, relies on efforts to gain ad hoc legislation through the politicization of history in order to convince the world of what Armenians refer to as the Armenian Genocide. This groundbreaking book argues that these political actions as well as the powerful identity narrative underpinning these actions is significant for several reasons. One, this emotive issue and the campaign it has spawned directly affects the future of multiple nation-states (Turkey and Armenia, in particular) as well as a non-state entity, the powerful Armenian diaspora. Two, the campaign regarding which semantics to use in referencing century-old events increasingly dominates international relations between Turkey and the West. Three, by deconstructing the role the trauma of 1915 plays in the development and fecundity of Armenian large group identity, as well as its transmission from generation to generation, an understanding of the quest to legislate reality through the politicization of history is gained. That is, century-old images and caricatures, often racist and bearing no relationship to present-day realities, underpin the campaign (the terrible Turk, anti-Muslim sentiments) and still carry weight - not only for Armenians but much of the West and Russia. This has normative implications and this book demonstrates how Armenian identity, which drives and informs the Armenian diaspora’s campaign of Armenian genocide, recognition actively undermines the strict legal definition and therefore legitimacy that is the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. This is done through the wanton application of term “genocide” to the events of 1915, which undercuts established definitions and norms and therefore allows and encourages the rather elastic use of the term for political gain. This further undermines the symbolic weight and power of the UN convention and thereby complicating the courts ability to punish genocide perpetrators.

Between 1915 and 1925 as many as 1.5 million Armenians, a minority in the Ottoman Empire, died in Ottoman Turkey, victims of execution, starvation, and death marches to the Syrian Desert. Peterson explores the American response to these atrocities, from initial reports to President Wilson until Armenia's eventual absorption into the Soviet Union.

This is a powerful combination of a touching family story, a compelling legal argument and a visionary olive branch solution to one of history's most intractable dilemmas. This book is a catalyst to ignite dialogue between Armenians and Turks. Reconciliation can only take place when truth and truce are declared. What has happened cannot be undone, but we need not be prisoners of the past. The truth will set us -- Armenians and Turks -- free. The book shows that while the truth is not negotiable, the terms of reconciliation are. For nearly a hundred years the truth has been held hostage. In the final analysis, if Turks and Armenians cannot resolve this between themselves, no one else can. Now the truth may be rescued. Turks and Armenians need a new vision; a new vision to demolish the wall; a new vision for a new century.

A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review