Modern Türkiye'nin İnşası

"The elites who orchestrated these processes [population policies] did not operate from predictable assumptions but from an arbitrary model of society that developed around the idea that society is a blank slate to be filled through the conditioning and manipulation of individuals. But as one researcher has argued, "the blank slate has a dark side." has. The void it creates in human nature is immediately filled by totalitarian regimes, and filling the void with genocide cannot be prevented. The void is filled by social engineering that will derail education, child-rearing and art... This is an anti-life and anti-human theoretical abstraction". (…) No matter how much the nationalist elites want it, there is no completely neutral homogeneity in cultural and ethnic terms. " The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire were regions where Armenians, Turks, Kurds and Arabs lived together. The dissolution of the empire and the emergence of the nation-state changed this situation drastically and through violent processes. The Construction of Modern Turkey examines the various nationalist population policies implemented by the Unionist and Kemalist regimes in eastern Turkey between 1913 and 1950, with the aim of ethnically homogenizing the region and incorporating it into the Turkish nation-state. It examines the social engineering tools used by the regime to ensure ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation-state, such as physical destruction, exile, forced assimilation and memory policies. This research, which comprehensively examines previous oral history studies, written sources and documents in the regions in question, reinforced by the author's personal interviews, reveals a rich perspective of discussion. Uğur Ümit Üngör shows how the eastern provinces, which were the center of social life where different ethnic identities lived together for years, were turned into the focus of population policies and the scene of mass violence by the nationalist elites.
(From the Promotional Bulletin)



Number of Pages: 480

Year of Print: 2016


Language: Turkish
Publisher: İletişim Publishing

First Print Year: 2016

Language: Turkish