A shameful debate? A critical reassessment of the ‘Torossian debate’

ABSTRACT

For years now, a debate has been going on concerning the memoirs of Sarkis Torossian, published in 1947, and republished in a commented Turkish version in 2012. This latter publication sparked a debate among a number of Turkish historians, divided over the reliability or not of Torossian’s account of his participation in the Ottoman war effort as an officer, and his subsequent desertion following the realization that most of his family had fallen victim to deportation and mass murder. Some challenged Torossian’s narrative and evidence, based on inconsistencies and errors, coming to the conclusion that his story was largely fictionalized and his documents forged. Others, on the contrary, took Torossian’s defence, trying to reject or to justify these inconsistencies, and suggesting that this criticism was likely to stem from a nationalist, or even denialist stand regarding the genocide of the Armenians. The debate has to a large extent remained contained within Turkey, and its rare international repercussions, including an article by Taner Akçam in the Journal of Genocide Research, have more or less systematically sided with the ‘pro-Torossian’ side. The present article aims to set the record straight by showing that the criticism levelled against Torossian’s memoirs is extremely serious and solid, and that the debate has been corrupted by a gradual slipping of what should have remained a scholarly discussion into an uncontrolled conflict based on ad hominem attacks and political allegations. It is my contention that the authenticity or not of Torossian’s narrative and documents is of very secondary importance, compared to the much more problematic issue of the way in which ideological, political and moral concerns have ended up hijacking the debate. The ultimate relevance of the so-called Torossian debate may well be its capacity to reveal some crucial weaknesses of genocide research in a late Ottoman context.     

The Archaeology of Jerusalem — Between Post-Modernism and Delegitimization

Abstract

The study of the motivations, influences, and agendas of Israeli archaeology has always been the centre of heated debate, the profession today finding itself under the full, and usually highly critical, glare of modern archaeological theory and/or political polemics. This paper addresses the motivations of some these critics and from under the mesh of often over-stated argumentation, tries to provide a more level appreciation of current archaeological work in Jerusalem. Quite contrary to the impression given by some of the recent scholarship, it is argued that the great majority of the published and excavated archaeology of Jerusalem of the past decades presents the finds of the multiplicity of periods of the city’s history, quite divorced from overt and even covert influence of the surrounding volatile political situation.     

A Bretton Woods moment? The 2007–2008 crisis and the future of global finance

The 2007–2008 global financial crisis encouraged speculation about the prospects for a ‘Bretton Woods moment’ in which the global financial system would be radically redesigned. Many of those hoping for this outcome have since become disillusioned with the limited nature of the international financial reform agenda. But the success and innovation of the Bretton Woods conference was made possible by unique political conditions that are not present today, notably concentrated power in the state system; a transnational expert consensus; and wartime conditions. Moreover, a close reading of history reveals that the Bretton Woods system did not emerge from a single moment but rather from a much more extended historical process. If a new international financial system is being born today, it will be a slower and more incremental development process that can be divided into four phases: a legitimacy crisis; an interregnum; a constitutive phase; and an implementation phase. Viewed from this perspective, post‐crisis developments look more significant. The crisis of 2007–2008 has already intensified twin legitimacy crises relating to international financial policy and leadership. It has also generated an international reform initiative that has been unusual for its speed and internationally coordinated nature. Many of the details of this reform initiative remain unresolved and its content and breadth are hotly contested in various ways. We thus find ourselves in more of an interregnum than a constitutive phase. It remains unclear how quickly, if at all, the latter might emerge and in what form.     

Between Byzantium and Jerusalem? The principality of Antioch,Renaud of Châtillon,and the penance of Mamistra in 1158

In the summer of 1158, Manuel I Komnenos, emperor of Byzantium, brought a large force into Cilicia to quell Armenian resistance and to seek retribution for an attack launched on the Byzantine island of Cyprus by Renaud of Châtillon, prince of Antioch. In haste, Renaud came to the city of Mamistra, and performed a humiliating penance before agreeing to imperial overlordship. Historians have long conceived of this act as one forced on Renaud by Manuel and King Baldwin III of Jerusalem, and as marking the creation of a political condominium, which divided Antioch between these two rulers. This article seeks to challenge the established opinion by drawing attention to the diplomatic skill demonstrated by the Antiochenes, and the independence with which they pursued and secured close and favourable ties to Byzantium.     

The future of the Arctic: cauldron of conflict or zone of peace?

The forces of climate change and globalization are transforming the Arctic, tightening the links between this seemingly remote region and the world at large with regard to matters of environmental protection, sustainable development, and the pursuit of peace. This has triggered an explosion of both popular and scholarly interest in the far north. Much of the resultant literature is marked by persistent expectations that the Arctic will become the scene of escalating jurisdictional conflicts, resource wars, a new great game and even armed clashes during the coming years. Yet as the books considered in this review article make clear, these expectations are greatly exaggerated; there is much to be said for the proposition that armed conflict is less likely to occur in the Arctic than in most other parts of the world anytime soon. What is needed is an alternative paradigm to provide a basis for understanding the significance of the profound changes now eroding the old order in the Arctic and establishing a basis for framing innovative governance arrangements capable of ensuring the future of the Arctic as a zone of peace.     

Ritual performances and collective violence in divided cities – The riots in Belfast (1886) and Jerusalem (1929)

This article explores the interrelation of violence, space, and public rituals in Belfast and Jerusalem. With the image of being cities of violence, contested by two groups that compete for political and spatial hegemony, Belfast and Jerusalem are also characterised as divided, both on a material and symbolic level. The roots of this division can be traced back to the era of the British Empire, especially to the riots in Belfast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the uprisings in Jerusalem during the British Mandate of Palestine. In the wider context of British imperial policies of differentiation along religious lines and urban separation, communal identities were strengthened, and processes of residential segregation were accelerated, thereby creating urban frontiers. On the basis of historical sources, particularly reports by Royal Commissions of Inquiry that were set up to investigate the riots in Belfast and Jerusalem, this paper analyses how violent urban geographies were created in both cities in different but also remarkably similar ways. Down to the present day, public religious and political rituals, often combined with nationalist and militarist elements, are a crucial part of periodic manifestations of collective violence in these cities. Practices of appropriation of space and a temporary redrawing of borders and boundaries are dominant features of these rituals. Religious ceremonies, street parades, funeral processions or political demonstrations take place at contested sites or are led through areas “belonging” to the “other” group. The analysis shows that these ritual practices contributed greatly in transforming parts of the cities into urban spaces characterised by exclusion and imbued with memories of violence. This paper concludes that ritual performances in public space have a strong impact on the production and shaping of collective violence during riots.     

The tyranny of gendered spaces – reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy

This article argues critically that the consequences of a binary system of gender norms is experienced as a kind of gender tyranny both for those who transgress gender in their daily lives, but also for those whose lives are lived within such constraints. Feminist geographers and urban theorists have argued that space is gendered and that gendering has profound consequences for women. This article extends this analysis and shows how rigid categorizations of gender fail to include the intersexed and transgendered populations, a small and highly marginalized segment of the wider population. This article uses autoethnographic methods to illustrate the ways that those who transgress gender norms experience a tyranny of gender that shapes nearly every aspect of their public and private lives. The nature of these consequences is explored using citations from the transgender and queer literature as well as the lived experience of this tyranny by the author in a continuum of public to private spaces, including: parking lots, public restrooms, shopping malls, the workplace and the home.     

Frustrated,reconciled or divided? The Australian labor party and federalism

The Australian Labor Party has always been, and remains, a complex entity which encompasses both centralist/national and decentralist/federal interests and values. The common interpretation that the party has been historically ‘frustrated’ by federalism but is now ‘reconciled’ with it thus exaggerates both the frustration and the reconciliation.     

‘The face of the one who is making for Jerusalem’: The Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral and Joy1

This paper examines the Angel Choir of Lincoln Cathedral (c. 1256–80) from the perspective of two interrelated concepts: the heavenly Jerusalem and joy. Building on previous scholarly discussions of the choir’s unusual creativity and profusion of organic and iconographic decoration, it traces connections between the choir and the rich corpus of writing on the joys of the heavenly Jerusalem. In juxtaposition with the hagiography of St Hugh, this opens a valuable seam of meaning and offers a possible explanation for the choir’s decorative intensity. It also reveals a number of ways, previously unnoted, in which Hugh of Avalon and his spirituality are recalled by the choir built to house his relics.     

The challenge of the spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the history of the future, 1930–1970

Arthur C. Clarke’s 1946 essay on ‘The Challenge of the Spaceship’ was one of the founding manifestoes of the Space Age, and helped to establish him as the West’s leading techno-prophet. Restating his ideas in subsequent factual and fictional works, Clarke successfully propagated the belief that man’s destiny lay in space and that the process was already underway. On the surface Clarke’s oeuvre offers a classic astrofuturist model of progress as technology-driven, but on closer examination it also incorporates a more pessimistic, historically based strand of philosophy, British rather than American. This essay traces the genesis of Clarke’s early work and the influence upon him of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the moral philosophers Olaf Stapledon and C.S. Lewis. Toynbee was essentially a Christian pessimist who believed that western civilization was on the way out; his long historical perspectives were an important source of inspiration for Clarke, leading him to a cyclical rather than a simply progressive model of history which contemplated both the beginning and the end of civilizations. The concerns of Stapledon and Lewis with grand narratives of decline and redemption were also influences on Clarke. All this needs to be understood in relation to both the European experience of World War I and to the coming of the atomic bomb, the latter a profound influence on Clarke’s generation. Such perspectives gave European astroculture a more modulated vision of the human future in space than the technologically based astrofuturism which dominated in the USA.     

The ‘Feast of the Liberation of Jerusalem’: remembering and reconstructing the First Crusade in the Holy City, 1099–1187

Every year on 15 July the Latin inhabitants of twelfth-century Jerusalem celebrated a feast in remembrance of the capture of the Holy City by the forces of the First Crusade on that day in 1099. This article explores how the inhabitants of Jerusalem interpreted that day – the culminating events of the crusade – in the context of celebrating this 15 July feast. It examines the events which took place in Jerusalem as the city fell on 15 July 1099 and traces the establishment of the feast, showing that it was founded within a few years of 1099. It then considers the development of the feast over the course of the twelfth century and examines the ritual processions prescribed in one liturgical programme used in Latin Jerusalem. It argues that the route of these processions had two functions: firstly, it mirrored the actions of the First Crusaders in Jerusalem on 15 July 1099; and, secondly, it visibly aligned Latin Jerusalem with sites which were associated with the Old and New Testaments. The route of these processions in Jerusalem was intended to convey an interpretation of the First Crusade as the continuation of biblical history.     

Demographic and budgetary influence on the geography of the poll tax: alarm or false alarm?

"The paper examines the influence of demographic change and the adaptation of local authority budgets on the level of poll tax between local authorities. The changes introduced by the Local Government Finance Act [in the United Kingdom] are argued to make almost all the possible variation between areas depend upon demography and local decisions on expenditure. Means of assessing local expenditure need are outlined and a consistent measure is developed which is used to estimate the relative contributions of changing need, tax base, new expenditures and grants over the period 1974-85 and up to 1991. 'New realism' in local authority spending is argued to combine with demographic change to allow radically reduced potential poll tax levies to be estimated than have been forecast by other sources. The reductions are particularly significant in inner London and many metropolitan districts."     

Righting the course? Humanitarian intervention,the war on terror and the future of Afghanistan

The US‐led post 9/11 ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan was, by definition, not a humanitarian intervention. The intervention in Afghanistan was defined as an act of self‐defence by the US and it was one of the first steps in the ‘war on terror’ by the US and its allies: it had no intention or clear strategies for long‐term stabilization, state‐building or development. The US‐led international coalition failed to ‘find’ Al‐Qaeda in the short term and new arguments had to be made to justify continued international presence. The initial agenda was quickly blurred by a mismatch of intentions including those of long‐term stabilization and state‐building. The ideas developed through the Bonn Agreement (2001–5) and continued through the Afghanistan Compact (2006–10) have focused on building a centrally governed state (sometimes defined as democratic) that has a monopoly on the use of force. Their shortcomings are already well‐documented: the urgency of the Bonn Conference and of the adoption of the Bonn Agreement ostensibly meant trading expediency and stability for accountability and a clean slate, which is not to say that there were no good intentions at Bonn from stakeholders, but that Afghans and the international community put power‐sharing before progress. The choices made at Bonn may have contributed to the culture of impunity and the entrenched poverty that is gripping Afghanistan today. This article responds to the claims that state‐building and all that goes with it are not the responsibility of the ‘international community’ by addressing the accountability and humanitarian paradoxes. The question remains, however, about who should be responsible for reform and politically accountable in the aftermath of non‐humanitarian (and indeed even humanitarian) interventions?