Virtual lecture by Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser with discussant Lerna Ekmekcioglu.
The annual Raymond Kevorkian Genocide Commemoration Lecture is organized by the
Richard Hovannisian Chair of Modern Armenian History at UCLA, with co-sponsorship by the
Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA and the
UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES).
Monday, April 22, 2024
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (Pacific Time)
The Conference of Lausanne ended a decade of war, liquidating the Ottoman Empire, and setting the coordinates for the post-Ottoman world, including the Republic of Turkey. Alongside these achievements, there is the Conference’s darker side that also inspired the Nazis. Demographic engineering was approved and major principles of the League of Nations, including democracy and law-based international peace, were abandoned. In Lausanne, the surviving Ottoman Armenians were denied the right to return to their former homes and possessions. The project of an “Armenian Home” on ancestral land was buried, and justice for crimes against humanity was given up. This lecture takes stock of the Armenian nadir in Lausanne. It considers the background of an Ottoman decade of wars and genocide that had ended short-lived constitutional hopes in the wake of the Young Turk revolution. It interrogates this Ottoman Armenian experience in the light of Armenian survival world-wide and in the Caucasus, where today’s Armenia is a promising but precarious and beleaguered democracy. The question is how history will behave in a field of forces between vested interests, constitutional democracy and social Darwinist autocracy.
Hans-Lukas Kieser is Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia and Adjunct Professor at the University of Zurich. He is the author of numerous essays and several foundational books, including Turkey Beyond Nationalism: Towards Postnationalist Identities, and Talat Pasha: Founder of Modern Turkey and Architect of Genocide (2018). Kieser has also co-edited The End of the Ottomans: The Genocide of 1915 and the Politics of Turkish Nationalism.
Lerna Ekmekciogluis McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History and the director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at MIT. She is the author of
Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2016) and most recently of an important research article on the Armenian demands at the Lausanne Conference for a “National Home” within Turkey.
Sponsor(s): Armenian Studies Research and Outreach Program, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of History, Richard Hovannisian Chair of Modern Armenian History at UCLA, Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA Law, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR).