The Armenian Genocide

The extermination of the Armenians constitutes the first genocide of the twentieth century. While in the last third of the nineteenth century the massacres targeting Armenian populations were numerous and terrible within the Ottoman State, in 1915 it was a matter of the eradication of a millennial human community from the Anatolian plateau by a state authority acting in the name of a global ideological project stigmatising a group defined in religious and ethnic terms and destroyed as such. Even today, however, this genocide raises questions of law (international criminal law, fundamental rights, criminal science) and of memory (the question of recognition, commemorations, the monumentality of remembrance, memorial laws). These two axes were adopted by the International Institute for Research on Conflictuality (IiRCO), specialised in the management of conflict and post-conflict situations, during the international meetings held at the University of Limoges for the Centenary. This Cahier is the result: it brings together diverse approaches — academic lawyers, historians, a barrister, an essayist — suited to revisiting differently a dossier marked by suffering, disputes, and political and diplomatic stakes that prevent it from being closed.