‘The term genocide risks conflating what are often very different experiences’

What is ethical political commemoration and what is it not?

The ethics of political commemoration is broadly a multi-dimensional framework. The idea is that for commemoration to be ethical, it's not enough to satisfy just one criterion – it should satisfy several and ideally all of the criteria involved. One of those is, for example, the question of intention. Strengthening in-group solidarity is an understandable intention, but it's not yet one that builds a better future, that makes a better kind of peace in the future possible. Commemoration should have a good intention, but it also needs what we call legitimate authority. Authority in the sense of the ability to make decisions, but also the legitimacy that comes from involving people in the process. So it’s not enough for political leaders to say: I have decided this is the right decision, I'm going to take down the statue. To have legitimate authority, that decision should be preceded by a public discussion. It's not just that commemoration needs to satisfy some ethical criteria. Ethics, at its best, is about how we want to live and how we can sustain how we live. It's about finding sustainable solutions that work for as many people as possible.

The recent Irish ‘decade of centenaries’ features prominently in your book as an example of ethical political commemoration. But it happened at a significant temporal remove from the events being remembered. Is that always the case?

Yes, Ireland I think is an important example, where we see a president who gets very engaged in setting the tone for the discussion. It is indeed a case where people look back over a century. Arguably today this speeds up much more, also because of social media in its mix of being, on the one hand, ephemeral and, on the other, very fixed, very textual. It's very different from an uttered word, from something that people say.

One of the things that's important to us in the book is the idea that commemoration is not just about something that some politicians somewhere or some academics should do. I have highlighted how every citizen can get engaged. For example, by highlighting forgotten heritage on something like Wikipedia. This can of course be something that just happened six months ago that is already in danger of being forgotten. But it may very well be something that reaches back decades or even centuries.

You say in your book that ‘commemoration needs a reasonable chance of success in forging a better peace in the future’. What do you mean by that?

Yes, ‘reasonable chance of success’ is one of the four criteria we set out for Ius ad Memoriam or what to remember. Sometimes you have a good cause. Take the example of dealing with Stalin in his birth town of Gori in Georgia, where there is a Stalin Museum. You have to ask the question, what lessons of democracy are children learning when they go to a museum like this? There might be an argument for closing the museum. And some diplomats have called for its closure, but realistically, that has no reasonable chance of success because local people will say: It's the one thing that brings tourists to our otherwise in many ways forlorn town. It’s the one thing we can be proud of.

What other solutions might there be? Some people have suggested renaming the museum the Museum of Stalinism. It's one tweak, but it makes a big difference. Then there’s the idea of holding a biannual exhibition where you invite artists to negotiate and deal with that kind of heritage. So rather than taking something away from people, you add, you give them something. We see a strong role here for local research, for people who understand what words are being used, what terms resonate with local people and what their values are. In that way it's not just about people coming in from the outside and saying: Oh, here's this ethical framework, now go ahead and apply it. It is very important to attend to what resonates with people so you can bring them along.

Can you explain your ambivalence about the struggle for genocide recognition in Armenia and other parts of the world?

This is contentious and sensitive territory, of course. I think there's a risk with genocide recognition that it becomes a kind of yes-no decision, where unless you can demonstrate that your experience is genocide, it somehow is in a kind of lower category of suffering. Genocide, as some people have pointed out, risks trying to conflate what are often very different experiences. Early on in the study of the Armenian genocide, there was an attempt to say in what ways it was similar to the Shoah when in reality it was in many ways very, very different. Such atrocities are often very specific in how and when they take place, and even in their geography. There is a danger here of losing sight of the individuality of the experience. Even in my own experience of commemorating particular figures in Armenia, one of the most compelling moments was being at a reading of names, where I was called forward to read the names of people killed in the 1937 purges. I remember stumbling over a name, Sogomon Boiakhjian. I was reading it in Cyrillic and unsure how to stress the syllables, and someone from the group that was present called in and helped me – and that made me think of that individuality, of that farmer from the village of Basargejar in rural Armenia, who lost his life to political violence.

Now, I understand that to people who suffered something terrible and where this experience is handed down generations, it can almost seem like a sign of disrespect to say, well, maybe the term genocide doesn't do it justice. But it’s so important to be very specific to time and place and name. I see it as a sign of respect when people like Walter Laqueur are skeptical about terms like the Holocaust and instead use HaShoah or the Shoah to describe this moment of disruption in the language of the people that experienced it.

You refer on many occasions to the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity – can you tell us about it?

The Aurora Prize is a global humanitarian award that recognises those who risk their own lives to save the lives of others suffering due to violent conflict or atrocity crimes. A handful of Armenians created the prize. They took what was a very specific Armenian experience, that huge dislocation embedded in the experience of the Armenian Genocide, and said, to quote one of the founders: I cannot thank the people that saved my grandparents, but I can thank people that save other people around the planet today. With the status of being a victim, there is a risk that you create your own circular narrative. The Aurora Prize points to a way of exiting that. It's about surviving. It's about reviving and thriving, because it's really important that the experience of being a victim isn't inscribed in people’s biographies several generations down. And it’s about giving back.
There’s another reason why we highlight the Aurora Prize in our book. There is a notion that the innovations with regard to public discussions of commemoration only come from the centre. I think some mainstream debates in some countries can really get deadlocked, partly because they slot into existing divisions. And the Aurora Prize shows that a fresher look, at least at some of our challenges, can sometimes come from the periphery. That’s why this prize is so deserving of study and engagement.