2 May 2023 | 17.30 – 19.00 | PC Hoofthuis, Room 1.05 – Spuistraat 134 Amsterdam | University of Amsterdam

A TSN Lecture by Kate Creasey (Brown University)

Discussant: Dr. Alp Yenen (Leiden University)
Moderator: Dr. Ayşenur Korkmaz (University of Amsterdam)

Following the 12 September 1980 coup in Turkey, the left was decimated, military rulers subjected the country’s economy to IMF-style reforms, and Kurdish activists were ruthlessly persecuted. Less known is how the coup radically altered the archival landscape of Turkey in two ways. First, the military junta initiated the redaction of the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul and founded a new state archive for material from the Republican period in Ankara. Second, leftists destroyed not only their personal archives, but also the archives of their political and community organizations to avoid persecution by the military regime for their activities. My paper highlights the central role archival destruction played in the events of the coup and its aftermath. I reflect on the way both events—the creation of state archives and the destruction of personal and community archives—have shaped the landscape of contemporary Turkish historiography. This “twin” legacy of the coup thus presents a methodological challenge: How does one write a history for an event that itself changed the nature of archives and resulted in the loss of personal, cultural, and political texts? Based on oral history interviews and archival research in Turkey, Germany, and the Netherlands, my paper explores how archive destruction can be understood as a form of personal preservation and political strategy in late Cold War Turkey. In so doing, it interrogates the ethical responsibilities, methodological challenges, and political stakes of (re-) creating through historical research the contours of destroyed archives.

Kate Creasey is a doctoral student at Brown University, the Department of History. Her research is on the 1980 Turkish military coup in the broader context of Cold War military dictatorships and counterinsurgency. She is particularly interested in the use of visual source materials to explore gaps or moments of repression in popular consciousness of this period. Currently, Kate is working on a co-edited volume with Timur Hammond on coups and the politics of archives in Turkish history.

Alp Yenen is a TSN member and University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. Dr. Yenen works primarily on the political history of modern Turkey and the Middle East. He is specialized on the turn of the 20th century, First World War, Interwar period, and the Cold War period. He has published the co-edited volume Age of Rogues: Rebels, Revolutionaries, and Racketeers at the Frontiers of Empires (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). His articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Contemporary European History, Behemoth – A Journal on Civilisation, Die Welt des Islams: International Journal for the Study of Modern Islam, and Middle Eastern Studies.

Ayşenur Korkmaz is a TSN member and guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam, from where she also obtained her PhD in European Studies. Her current work focuses the multifaceted aftereffects of the Armenian genocide in Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia. She published several peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on the Hamidian Massacres, the Armenian genocide, post-genocide memories in Soviet Armenia, and Armenian heritage tourism in eastern Turkey.