Turkish Genocide Denial as a National Security Concept
Historian Taner Akçam is the inaugural director of the Armenian Genocide Research Program of the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA. Previously he was the Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair in Modern Armenian History and Genocide in the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.
Akçam grew up in Turkey, where he was imprisoned for editing a political youth journal and was subsequently adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International in 1976. Akçam later received political asylum in Germany. In 1996 he received his doctorate from the University of Hanover with a dissertation on The Turkish National Movement and the Armenian Genocide Against the Background of the Military Tribunals in Istanbul Between 1919 and 1922.
Akçam is widely recognized as one of the first Turkish scholars to write extensively on the Ottoman-Turkish Genocide of the Armenians in the early twentieth century. He is the author of more than ten scholarly works as well as numerous articles in Turkish, German, and English on Armenian Genocide and Turkish nationalism. As well, he is the founder of Krikor Guerguerian Online Archive.
Taner's most known books are A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006, received the 2007 Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction) and Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012; awarded the 2013 Hourani Book Prize of The Middle East Studies Association; selected as one of Foreign Affairs’ Best Books on the Middle East for 2012). Akçam’s latest book is Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (Palgrave 2018). Because of the findings in this book, Akçam was introduced by the New York Times as “Sherlock Holmes of the Armenian Genocide.”
Taner Akçam's presentation commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and is the Center’s annual lecture dedicated to Armenian Studies.
Food for Thought: Podcast with Taner Akcam