"They Can Live in the Desert" | Ronald Grigor Suny

E356 | "They Can Live in the Desert" with Ronald Grigor Suny In this episode we talk about the history of the Armenian genocide, drawing on Ronald Grigor Suny’s 2015 monograph, “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide. First, we discuss the conditions that led to these events, which affected not only Armenians but also Assyrians, Kurds, and a host of others across the empire. What factors set the stage for mass violence, who were the key actors, and how was the destruction actually carried out? In the second half, we turn to the legal and political developments at the United Nations, among Armenian communities in the diaspora, and within Turkey, to examine how the genocide has been remembered, commemorated, and written into history. See more at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/04/suny.html Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of "They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else": A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton University Press, 2015). Matthew Ghazarian is a Ph.D. Candidate in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, African Studies. His research focuses on the intersections of natural disaster, humanitarianism, and sectarianism, in central and eastern Anatolia between 1839 and 1893. CREDITS Episode No. 356 Release Date: 7 April 2018 Recording Location: Istanbul, Turkey Audio editing by Matthew Ghazarian Music: "Qele-qele" and "Antuni" – sung by Armenak Shahmuradian, accompanied and arranged by Komitas Vartabed, courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Komitas. Images courtesy of Houshamadyan and Wikimedia Commons. Available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2018/04/suny.html