Description: Denial of Violence seeks to decipher the roots of the denial by Turkish and Ottoman officials of acts of violence committed against Armenians. Based on a qualitative analysis of over 300 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to 2009, Fatma Müge Göçek analyzes denial as a multilayered process that starts with the advent of systematic modernity in the Ottoman Empire in 1789 and continues to this day in the Turkish Republic.
Review Quotes: "At the heart of Fatma Müge Göçek's book is the claim that forgetting doesn't just happen. Rather, forgetting (and remembering) happens in a context, with profound political and personal stakes for those involved. And this forgetting has consequences. Denial of Violence looks at how this process played out in Turkey in the past 200 years. ...thoughtful and intellectually rigorous." -New Books Network
"[A]cknowledgement of the long term consequences of violence for perpetrators as well as victims as well as an integration of the aftermaths of the Genocide into wider histories of modern Turkish politics and society is an important departure from the existing literature...Such willingness to engage with complex and prolonged patterns of violence rather than simply reproduce national narratives in painting all Turks as perpetrators and all Armenians as eternal victims is another strength of this work...a welcome addition..."--Dr. Joanne Laycock, Reviews in History"Göçek's Denial of Violence is vast and defies easy characterization...By bringing the story of denial across historical periods that had been separated primarily to map the political needs of nationalist politicians, Göçek can also shed light on the specific motivations of Turkish officials in the 1920s to mount a campaign of denial...[A] magisterial book..."--Keith David Watenpaugh, American Historical Review