Ronald Grigor Suny will speak about the controversies over whether the deportations and massacres of Armenians and Assyrians in the late Ottoman Empire constitute a genocide by the Young Turk government. Reviewing the massive documentation of the events, and the recent findings of scholars on the subject, Suny considers the conflicting narratives on 1915 and develops his own analysis of why a government turned to a policy of eliminating several of its subject peoples.Karen Barkey, Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, will introduce and moderate the event.

This event is sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and theMiddle East Institute.

Ronald Grigor Suny is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. He is author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918; The Making of the Georgian Nation;Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History; The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union; The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States; and, most recently, “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. He is also co-editor of A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire.