ÜMIT KURT: Biographies of Violence: Personhood, Agency and Mass Killing in the Late Ottoman Empire

ABSTRACT:

The systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire was planned and executed by a cadre of individuals. Although in recent decades historians have explored the biographies of leading figures in the Committee of Union and Progress (the ruling party of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, hereafter CUP) and scrutinized their roles in the annihilation of the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire, there is little systematic research on the motivations of and interactions among those perpetrators. Furthermore, most participants in the genocide on the local level are still unknown today. To address this gap in the literature, my seminar will explore the lives and legacies of three genocide perpetrators at the provincial level. The life and actions of three men provide us with insights that help better understand the dynamics of the politics of persecution, the bureaucracy of genocide, the identity and mental world of the perpetrators under CUP leadership, and the manifold facets of genocidal violence. In addition, whereas the mainstream narrative of Turkish history emphasizes a rupture between the Ottoman Empire and the new republic, a careful analysis of the life stories, careers and actions of these perpetrators reveals the intellectual, ideological and other continuities between the CUP and the republican regime founded in 1923.