ASP Lecture. “Mass Violence from the Balkans to Anatolia into the Caucasus, 1912-23."

In the process of Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian imperial collapse, roughly in the decade 1912–23, millions of soldiers were killed in regular war hostilities. But hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians were also victimized as a result of expulsions, pogroms, and other forms of persecution and mass violence. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 erased the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans and marked a devastating blow to Ottoman political culture. The years 1915–16 saw the destruction of the Anatolian Armenians, organized by the Young Turk political elite and carried out by a host of forces. Lastly, the period 1917-23 is of great significance for the history of the Caucasus, both North and South, as it witnessed total war and massacres of civilians. Many studies of this kaleidoscope of violence have focused on the domestic roots and impacts of these processes. But might a transnational perspective offer a new understanding of their genesis, the scope of the events, and the scale of their implications? This lecture will approach these conflicts by developing a transnational perspective and exploring to what extent they were related to each other.

Ugur Ümit Üngör (1980) gained his Ph.D. in 2009 (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. In 2008–09, he was lecturer in international history at the Department of History of the University of Sheffield, and in 2009–10, he was post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for War Studies of University College Dublin. Currently he is assistant professor at the Department of History at Utrecht University and at the NIOD: Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass violence, especially during the fragmentation and collapse of states. His most recent publications include Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum, 2011) and The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011). In 2013, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Heineken Young Scientist Award for History.

Sponsors: ASP, CREES