Epistemic Injustice from Afar: Rethinking the Denial of Armenian Genocide

ABSTRACT

Genocide denialism is an understudied topic in the epistemic injustice scholarship; so are epistemic relations outside of the Euro-American context. This article proposes to bring the literature into contact with an underexplored topic in a ‘distant’ setting: Turkey. Here, I explore the ethical and epistemological implications of the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide as a pervasive and systematic epistemic harm. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I argue that a philosophical exploration of genocide denialism requires examining the role of institutions and ideology in relation to the epistemic harm done by individual perpetrators. More specifically, I suggest that the individual, ideological, and institutional roots of genocide denialism constitute a regime of epistemic injustice in Turkey.

KEYWORDS:

• Genocide denial
• epistemic injustice
• Armenian genocide
• testimonial injustice
• ideology

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer and the special issue editor, Melanie Altanian, for their extremely helpful comments. I am grateful to Caroline McKusick, Ekin Bodur, Nazlı Özkan, Tuğba Sevinç, Nisa Göksel, Dilek Hüseyinzadegan, and Saniye Vatansever, who commented on various drafts. I would also like to thank the participants of the “Epistemic Injustice in the Aftermath of Collective Wrongdoing” workshop for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I prefer to use the term regime to characterize this social-political context steeped in genocide denialism, because it is systematic, pervasive and founded upon the collective ‘Turkish’ social imagination, which I explore later in the article.

2. Credibility excess refers to the condition of being granted too much (undeserved) credibility as a speaker in testimonial exchanges due one’s privileged status.

3. Medina coins the term active ignorance to address a type of ignorance that involves a resistance to incorporating true belief and rejecting false belief (Medina 2013, 57).

4. Another key term central to my discussion is epistemic vice, as discussed by Medina: ‘a set of corrupted attitudes and dispositions that get in the way of knowledge’ (Medina 2013, 30).

5. Throughout the article, I use scare quotes around ‘Turkish’ intentionally to highlight Turkishness as a mode of existence based on institutional and ideological ideas, attitudes and practices, rather than a self-evident ethnic identity. The main reason behind this preference is Turkey’s imperial past. There are many ethnic minorities in Turkey (e.g. Circassians, Bosnians, Arabs, Georgian Muslims, Albanians), groups that were not ethnically Turkish but became assimilated into the dominant Turkish identity as a result of the intensive Turkification policies of the Republic (see Aktar 2010).

6. The ruling Ottoman elite at the time, the Young Turks, were all members of the same political organization, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).

7. There were also cases, where women and children were abducted, women raped and taken into Muslim homes and children placed in orphanages. The Young Turk government ‘openly encouraged Ottoman Muslim households’ to take in Armenian women and children (Ekmekçioğlu 2016, 34).

8. It is important to note that there is not one single official narrative, but multiple changing narratives across the Republic’s history. For a discussion, see Jennifer M. Dixon’s study (Dixon 2010).

9. This term is used in Turkey to address, either specifically, the 1915–16 Ottoman deportations of Armenians, or more generally, the history of the ‘conflict’ between Armenians and Turks, which includes Armenian Diaspora attempts to internationally lobby against Turkey’s denialist politics.

10. Apart from the political efforts of the diaspora, Armenian citizens of Turkey have also developed ways to resist epistemically (see Medina 2013, 48–9) to the denial executed by the Turkish Republic (see Bilal 2019; Cheterian 2015, 15).

11. In the article, I explore the first three of the reasons listed above.

12. I had to limit myself to the exploration of testimonial injustice Armenians endure and refrain from a discussion of hermeneutical injustice, although I am aware that these two forms of epistemic injustice are deeply connected in the context of genocide denialism. In the literature, hermeneutical injustice is characterized as a wrong done due to the lack of epistemic resources necessary to make sense of a particular issue or experience (Fricker 2007, 149; Medina 2013, 90).

13. For a discussion of the relation between epistemic and non-epistemic harms, see Congdon (2017); Medina (2013, 183–5).

14. Apart from Dink’s murder, there were also other racist hate crimes against Armenians: The suspicious death of the Armenian soldier Sevag Balıkçı on 24 April 2011, and the violent attacks against elderly Armenian women in the district of Samatya (in Istanbul) in 2012. For relevant news reports and articles, see Arango (2013) and Guitard (2015).

15. I would like to thank Melanie Altanian for pointing out this existential implication at the ‘Epistemic Injustice in the aftermath of Collective Wrongdoing’ workshop.

16. The Young Turk ideology of Turkish ethno-nationalism is also known as Turkism.

17. Throughout the history of the Turkish Republic, the racial category of Turk has changed, and for the majority of the population, lost its biological foundations as a result of the Republic’s (assimilationist) Turkification politics. For relevant discussions, see Ünder (2008); Aktar (2010); Astourian (1999).

18. Ünlü’s work (Ünlü 2018) is significant in suggesting that the Armenian genocide is constitutive of Turkishness.

19. As Medina notes, ‘these vices are not universal and automatic features of the privileged.’ His position aims to underscore that ‘the social positionality of agents does matter for the development of their epistemic character, and that particularly extreme and damaging forms of epistemic vices […] can be found in privileged classes (Medina 2013, 40).

20. There is an exception to this. In 2008, coupled with the rage against the assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, an ‘I apologize’ campaign was launched in Turkey. More than thirty thousand people gave their signatures to the campaign. The campaign message read: ‘My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them.’ For the campaign website, see: www.ozurdiliyoruz.info. For a critical discussion of this campaign, see Erbal (2012).

21. Shafak appears to be referring to the absence of knowledge regarding the collective violence committed against Armenians in the past.

22. In 1992, Taner Akçam published the first critical book on the Armenian genocide in Turkey (i.e., one that rejects the official narrative). The publication of this book, among others released during the 1990s, slowly instigated the questioning of the Turkish official narrative in small circles. A leading journalist, Hasan Cemal, narrates his personal transformation after reading Akçam’s books (Cemal 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Arizona State University, College of Integrative Sciences and Arts Summer Research Award (2020).

Notes on contributors

Imge Oranlı

Imge Oranlı is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Her work explores philosophical theories of evil, violence and epistemic injustice to examine their implications for analyzing different forms of social injustices.