Defending the Nation? Maintaining Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide

Abstract

This paper focuses on two recent periods in which agents of the Turkish state actively defended Turkey's official narrative of the Armenian genocide. I argue that the set of strategies developed by Turkish officers and bureaucrats under the military regime in power from 1980 to 1983 established a pattern of state response that was replicated by bureaucratic elites in the face of new challenges to the official narrative two decades later. Understanding this authoritarian legacy helps explain the mechanisms by which and repertoire of action through which agents of the Turkish state have defended and re-produced its official narrative.

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