Armenians commemorate the 111th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan
Dr. Elyse Semerdjian is the award-winning author of the 2023 book, ‘Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide’ and the Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She spoke to CSI on the eve of the 111th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide to discuss how Turkish state policy of genocide denial manifests in pressures against scholars and today’s Armenian government, and why the “peace of the graveyard” does not protect Armenia but is actually dangerous for its survival.
This interview was conducted on April 22, 2026.
On March 12, you were one of a group of genocide scholars that signed a letter concerning the forced resignation of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute director, Dr. Edita Gzoyan, flagging a “chilling signal” that the truth was being silenced in the service of diplomatic comfort. The current government in Armenia insists that topics of friction with Azerbaijan and Turkey, including the Armenian Genocide and Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh), must be abandoned in order to move on and achieve peace. As a scholar, how do you respond to this?
I believe that Article 301 of Turkey, which criminalizes the denigration of Turkishness and the Turkish government, is actually a foreign policy and not just a domestic policy.
It has been used in some scenarios to silence or even penalize academics, such as Donald Quataert after he wrote a critical but positive book review of Donald Bloxham’s ‘The Great Game of Genocide’.
The Institute of Turkish studies, which was funded by the Turkish government, is now defunct, but was leveraging their financing in order to penalize scholars who were amenable to the Armenian Genocide as a legitimate research topic.
It seems in the case of Armenia’s relations with Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenia is also being placed under those types of pressures to control speech.
Similarly, Bashar al-Assad began restraining speech on the Armenian Genocide in Syria after he began to warm relations with Turkey in 2005. So, there is a pattern of Turkey using its domestic policy as a foreign policy tool.
I have not seen yet Pashinyan’s statement for April 24, but I would expect similar statements to what we’ve seen in recent years: watered down, almost victim blaming-type rhetoric, that Ottoman Armenians were rebellious and had to pay the price, which is exactly the Turkish narrative on the subject.
The denial of justice to the victims of 1915 and the victims of 2023 in Artsakh will never produce a true peace. It will be the peace of the graveyard.
I do realize there are ongoing international court case for atrocities committed against Armenians, but when Armenia itself withdraws support for those efforts, it is undermining support for international law.
Armenia being on Trump’s Board of Peace, again an erroneous name, when Pashinyan joins a board like that, it sends a very clear signal that he is not interested in international law.
This is unfortunate, because I think international law is something Armenians need to survive the world.
I am very worried about the precarity that Armenia is going to be facing as it decides to pursue peace outside the international legal order.
How do such state-backed campaigns of erasure impact the academic sphere? What role do historians play in the preservation of memory?
Not only historians but academics at this moment are facing a global tide of authoritarianism. Seventy-five percent of the world is living under authoritarian rule.
We are actually obliged as scholars by AAUP guidelines in America to defend academic freedom. It is our job, it is a professional duty, it’s not just something we can ignore when it’s convenient.
I do take issue with scholars who’ve been quiet about genocide when they are genocide scholars, turning the other way, or being very careful with their words to preserve access.
I’m intimately familiar with that process, because many scholars of Syria also refrained from criticizing the Assad regime in order to preserve access.
However, we are obliged by our professional standards to defend academic freedom.
I was compelled to speak out about Edita because of the unique nature of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, and the fact that she was a woman in charge. She may have been the first woman.
She had done exceptional work in making links between the researchers in Yerevan and in the United States, and in the diaspora in general.
She held a large conference last year and was bringing people into the fold, including scholars who don’t consider themselves to be Armenian Genocide scholars but were contributing to the field.
And she is a scholar of gender so there is a lot of irony about the targeting of a female researcher for handing over books published by and available at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute to a politician, as if that were some sort of egregious offense.
That is why we were compelled to write this letter and gather signatures but there were obvious absences, there were people who didn’t sign that letter who could have, and that is very telling.
This year’s Armenian Genocide commemoration comes amid the news that Azerbaijan has completely demolished the central cathedral of what was the capital of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) — only the latest piece of Armenian heritage to be erased. How does cultural erasure factor into the act of genocide?
Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide included two aspects of violence: barbarity was an attack against individual persons; vandalism was an attack against objects.
This aspect of genocide theory was long dormant, but scholars in recent years have really taken this up, because objects are extensions of people. Books, heritage are extensions of people and the national fabric they belong to.
For me, the person who has done the best work on this is Heghnar Watenpaugh. In ‘The Missing Pages’, she looks at manuscripts and Armenian books that were assaulted during the genocide. Our objects were actually assaulted along with the people during the Armenian Genocide.
This is clear with Azerbaijan today. When the people are uprooted in places like Artsakh, the Azerbaijani government has actually deemed the remnants of those people – the objects they left behind, the buildings that they built – as extensions of the national project.
When Lemkin talks about things like destruction of the national fabric of a people as being genocide, we have to include objects, and yes, the demolishing of the cathedral in Stepanakert is part of that process.
Genocide scholars no longer look at genocide as an event, but as a process. It’s ongoing. And whether we’re looking at Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) or Gaza, we can see that these are processes that are ongoing and the attempts at erasure will possibly continue in perpetuity.
Even in the case of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, many remnants of our community still exist there, and they are deemed national threats.
