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The third lecture of the 2021 Ömer Engin Lütem Conferences was held online on 4 March 2021. The main speaker of the lecture titled “The Ottoman-Armenian Relocation in Context” was Prof. Dr. Edward J. Erickson. In this presentation, the focus was on Prof. Dr. Erickson’s recently published book, “A Global History of Relocation in Counterinsurgency Warfare.”

The lecture started with the introductory remarks by Dr. Maxime Gauin, a contributor to the book. In his speech, Dr. Gauin talked about the aforementioned book mentioned in general and his chapter titled “Uneven Repression, The Ottoman State and its Armenians” in particular. In his presentation, Prof. Dr. Erickson, utilizing a detailed PowerPoint presentaion, emphasized that population removal was a widely applied strategy used by the Great Powers in counterinsurgency warfare both in the 19th and 20th centuries for national security purposes. Hence, another emphasis in his presentation was that the relocation and resettlement of Ottoman-Armenians in 1915 was not the first population removal in history nor the last. In addition to that, to provide context for the Ottoman experience, Prof. Dr. Erickson compared the significant campaigns of population relocation used by the British, the Spanish, the Americans, and the Russians.

Please click here to access the video recording of the lecture given by Prof. Dr. Edward J Erickson.