Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk ‘Social Engineering’

Abstract

This article addresses population politics in the broader Young Turk era (1913-1950), which included genocide, deportation, and forced assimilation of various minority populations. The article opens with an account of the genesis of the concept 'social engineering' and provides a synopsis of the literature in the field of Young Turk population politics. It then focuses on the implementation of these nationalist population politics in the eastern provinces to exemplify these policies in detail. The article aims to clarify that the Armenian genocide cannot be understood in isolation from broader Young Turk population politics and argues that a generation of traumatized Young Turk politicians launched and perpetuated this violent project of societal transformation in order to secure the existence of a Turkish nation-state.

The Taboo within the Taboo: The Fate of ‘Armenian Capital’ at the End of the Ottoman Empire

“…This confiscation process, which was initiated by the Abandoned Property Commission (Emvâl-i Metruke Komisyonu) and the Liquidation Commission (Tasfiye Komisyonu), was highly bureaucratized and involved keeping detailed registers of the items, properties, and capital that were confiscated from the Armenian deportees, with the claim that they would be returned to them in their "relocated" destinations. 8 In other words, the documentation of 'Armenian capital' during the confiscation process should be considered both an important source for the reconstruction of the 'Armenian economy' on the eve of World War I, and a blue print for population engineering in Anatolia (Üngör 2008;Dündar 2001Dündar , 2008).…”