Uğur Ümit Üngör
Biographic Data
| ID | 338997 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Uğur Ümit Üngör |
| GIVEN NAMES | Uğur Ümit |
| FAMILY NAME | Üngör |
| SIGNATURE | ÜNGÖR U Ü |
| AFFILIATIONS | Utrecht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7125-118X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 50 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies by Güneş Murat Tezcür (review)
Introduction: An Exchange on the Concept of Genocide
Introduction to the Roundtable
Screaming, Silence, and Mass Violence in Israel/Palestine
The fields of Holocaust and Genocide Studies contain an inherent paradox, especially regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.On the one hand, the Holocaust was an important rationale for the establishment of Israel, and a number of scholars, institutions, and communities perceive the Holocaust as "unique" and even sacrosanct in history. 1 On the other hand, in the global human experience of genocide the Holocaust can be seen as "a genocide," 2…
Special issue Editors’ Introduction: Narrating exile in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world
The Tadamon Massacre: Archiving Violence through the Perpetrators' Gaze
On 16 April 2013, the Assad regime’s Military Intelligence Branch 227 committed a massacre of over 300 civilians (including women and children) in Damascus, by driving them to a secluded part of Tadamon neighborhood, taking them to a pre-dug pit, and executing them one by one. The perpetrators videotaped the entire massacre, footage that was never intended to be circulated, but a source close to the perpetrators leaked the video to us. Having ana…
Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System
An estimated 300,000 people have been detained or have died in prison since the Syrian uprising broke out. Syrians can be arrested for liking a post on Facebook or for the political activities of a distant relative. They are imprisoned without trial, and tortured and starved, often to death. This book is the first to expose the worst prisons in the Middle East, if not the world. In previous years it had been too dangerous to undertake research on…
Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side: A Conversation about Perpetrators
An interview conducted by Uğur Üngör with Alexander L. Hinton and A. C. G. M. Robben about their new book, Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (Stanford University Press, 2023)
The Heavy Costs of Impunity for Syria’s Mass Violence
After more than a decade of armed conflict in Syria, few perpetrators of mass violence have been held accountable for their actions. The Assad regime is the prime sponsor of impunity for these human rights abuses, but global and regional powers also bear responsibility for allowing the perpetuation of atrocities
Forum: Mass Violence in Syria
The conflict in Syria has now dragged on for over a decade. Some 600,000 people have been killed, millions more injured, maimed, and traumatized, 12 million people (half of the pre-war population)
Grim Optimism’: Protecting Civilians from Atrocities
Introduction: Paramilitarism as a Catalyst of Perpetration
Paramilitarism is key to understanding perpetration. Many studies of civil wars, counterinsurgencies, and genocides have demonstrated the central role of paramilitaries in the perpetration of violence against civilians. The organization of paramilitarism, from the top liaisons at the helm of the state, down to the killers who commit the violence is a crucial nexus to be examined. This special issue looks into paramilitarism in four different soci…
Mass Violence and the Kurds: Introduction to the Special Issue
The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence is long and complex. Whereas Kurds lived under the Kurdish Emirates for centuries in pre-national conditions in the Ottoman and Persian empires, the advent of nationalism and colonialism in the Middle East radically changed the situation. World War I was a watershed for most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Kurds, and some political minorities such as Armenians and Assyrians suffered…
Mass violence in Syria: Continuity and change
In 2011, the Syrian uprising rapidly escalated into a large-scale, complex, multi-dimensional civil war. Over a period of six years, the violence spread and became more intense, hundreds of thousan
Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State
From the deserts of Sudan to the jungles of Colombia, and from the streets of Belfast to the mountains of Kurdistan, paramilitaries have appeared in violent conflicts in very different settings. Paramilitaries are generally depicted as irregular armed organizations that carry out acts of violence against civilians on behalf of a state. In doing so, they undermine the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence, while at the same time creating a breed…
Shabbiha: Paramilitary groups, mass violence and social polarization in Homs
Within a year, the Syrian uprising in March 2011 developed into a civil war that gradually escalated and within 9 years killed over half a million people, displaced half the country’s prewar population, devastated the economy, and destabilized the entire region, and even the world. The Syrian civil war split the country into four factions that were continuously at war with each other with intermittent, unstable ceasefires: the Assad regime, the v…
Debate on The Killing Season: A history of the Indonesian massacres, 1965-1966 by Geoffrey B. Robinson, with Uğur Ümit Üngör, Vannessa Hearman, Gerry van Klinken and Geoffrey Robinson
A roundtable on Max Bergholz’s Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community
KEYWORDS: Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor and Francis Book PrizeMax BergholzviolencenationalismBosnia
Indonesia in the Global Context of Genocide and Transitional Justice
This epilogue highlights some of the main issues examined in this special issue. It argues that, compared to other cases, the scholarship on the Indonesian genocide is sophisticated and agenda-setting. We focus on the issues of organization and morphology of the 1965–66 violence, the problem of genocide denial, and questions related to transitional justice; finally, we propose promising new avenues of research
Funny as hell: The functions of humour during and after genocide
The history of genocide is replete with various humorous treatments by different actors with distinctive objectives. This type of dark humour treats the topic, which is usually enveloped with solemnity, in a satirical manner. This essay aims to study the functions of humour by comparatively examining victimized individuals' and groups' use of humour during and after violent episodes such as genocide. Why do victims use humour under conditions of …
The Collapse of the Ottoman andHabsburg Empires and the Brutalisationof the Successor States
The Collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and the Brutalisation of the Successor States This essay explores the interconnected issues of demobilisation and brutalisation in the collapsing Habsburg and Ottoman empires in the period immediately after 1918. Post-imperial Austria, Hungary and Turkey witnessed the emergence of sizeable paramilitary subcultures that were shaped by the successive traumatising experiences of war, defeat, territori…
Martin Shaw, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World
Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparison of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I
Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparisation of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I This article analyses the development of the Ottoman and Russian governments’ economic persecution of the Armenians and Jews during World War I. It will chart how this policy moved from boycott to discrimination, into confiscation and outright plunder, resulting in economic ruination for the victims. It identifies the main curre…
Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire
Lost in commemoration: The Armenian genocide in memory and identity
It is a commonplace in Genocide Studies to say that ‘Turkey denies the Armenian genocide’. The Turkish state's official policy towards the Armenian genocide was and is indeed characterized by misrepresentation, mystification and manipulation. But when one gauges what place the Armenian genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the cr…
Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson
Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the viol…
Lost in commemoration: The Armenian genocide in memory and identity
It is a commonplace in Genocide Studies to say that ‘Turkey denies the Armenian genocide’. The Turkish state's official policy towards the Armenian genocide was and is indeed characterized by misrepresentation, mystification and manipulation. But when one gauges what place the Armenian genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the cr…
Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson
Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the viol…
Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparison of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I
Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparisation of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I This article analyses the development of the Ottoman and Russian governments’ economic persecution of the Armenians and Jews during World War I. It will chart how this policy moved from boycott to discrimination, into confiscation and outright plunder, resulting in economic ruination for the victims. It identifies the main curre…
Funny as hell: The functions of humour during and after genocide
The history of genocide is replete with various humorous treatments by different actors with distinctive objectives. This type of dark humour treats the topic, which is usually enveloped with solemnity, in a satirical manner. This essay aims to study the functions of humour by comparatively examining victimized individuals' and groups' use of humour during and after violent episodes such as genocide. Why do victims use humour under conditions of …
Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and Persecution in the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1923
Considerable research has been conducted on the relationship between the First World War and the persecutions of Ottoman Armenians. So far, little is known about the aftermath of the catastrophe, in particular the fate of the survivors, mostly women and children who continued to live as best as they could on the fringes of society. This article addresses this hiatus and discusses the experience of Armenian survivors. It analyses the impact of the…
When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: The Processive Nature of Genocide
In the rapidly developing historiography of the Armenian Genocide, the processive character of pre-genocidal persecutions has received less attention than the genocidal process itself. This article treats the persecution of Ottoman Armenians as a cumulative process leading up to a mass-murder campaign in the summer of 1915. It addresses the evolution of CUP policy toward the Armenians through the prism of escalating persecution and the relationsh…
Against Massacre: Humanitarian Intervention in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914
Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk 'Social Engineering
This article addresses population politics in the broader Young Turk era (1913-1950), which included genocide, deportation, and forced assimilation of various minority populations. The article opens with an account of the genesis of the concept ‘social engineering’ and provides a synopsis of the literature in the field of Young Turk population politics. It then focuses on the implementation of these nationalist population politics in the eastern …
Rethinking the Violence of Pacification: State Formation and Bandits in Turkey, 1914-1937
This article discusses the changing relationship between Kurdish bandits and the Ottoman and Turkish states. Considerable research has been conducted on the impact of state formation on the establishment and maintenance of a monopoly of violence. But little is known about the state's use of outlaws for various security tasks. I address this hiatus and focus on the ebb and flow of Kurdish chieftains' relations to the state. Although these states f…
Forum: Mass Violence in Syria
The conflict in Syria has now dragged on for over a decade. Some 600,000 people have been killed, millions more injured, maimed, and traumatized, 12 million people (half of the pre-war population)
Grim Optimism’: Protecting Civilians from Atrocities
Mass violence in Syria: Continuity and change
In 2011, the Syrian uprising rapidly escalated into a large-scale, complex, multi-dimensional civil war. Over a period of six years, the violence spread and became more intense, hundreds of thousan
Shabbiha: Paramilitary groups, mass violence and social polarization in Homs
Within a year, the Syrian uprising in March 2011 developed into a civil war that gradually escalated and within 9 years killed over half a million people, displaced half the country’s prewar population, devastated the economy, and destabilized the entire region, and even the world. The Syrian civil war split the country into four factions that were continuously at war with each other with intermittent, unstable ceasefires: the Assad regime, the v…
When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: The Processive Nature of Genocide
In the rapidly developing historiography of the Armenian Genocide, the processive character of pre-genocidal persecutions has received less attention than the genocidal process itself. This article treats the persecution of Ottoman Armenians as a cumulative process leading up to a mass-murder campaign in the summer of 1915. It addresses the evolution of CUP policy toward the Armenians through the prism of escalating persecution and the relationsh…
Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk 'Social Engineering
This article addresses population politics in the broader Young Turk era (1913-1950), which included genocide, deportation, and forced assimilation of various minority populations. The article opens with an account of the genesis of the concept ‘social engineering’ and provides a synopsis of the literature in the field of Young Turk population politics. It then focuses on the implementation of these nationalist population politics in the eastern …
The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and state in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950
Team America: Genocide Prevention
Studying Mass Violence: Pitfalls, Problems, and Promises
This article examines some of the main pitfalls, problems, and promises of genocide research. It argues that genocide is a viable academic concept if protected from moral, legal, political, and emotional constraints. It should be approached in a dispassionate, amoral, non-juridical, and apolitical way. The article further discusses a model for understanding genocide that identifies three levels of analysis: the interstate pressures of the global …
Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and Persecution in the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1923
Considerable research has been conducted on the relationship between the First World War and the persecutions of Ottoman Armenians. So far, little is known about the aftermath of the catastrophe, in particular the fate of the survivors, mostly women and children who continued to live as best as they could on the fringes of society. This article addresses this hiatus and discusses the experience of Armenian survivors. It analyses the impact of the…
Untying the tongue-tied: Ethnocide and language politics
This article addresses Young Turk language policy towards Kurdish in the interwar period. It argues that most Young Turk nationalists treated Turkey's Kurdish minority as assimilable raw ethnic material, as a result of which Kurds became the object of large-scale cultural and linguistic policies aimed at “Turkification”. This article charts how these language policies infringed upon Kurdish life. It will (a) briefly introduce the Young Turk cultu…
Rethinking the Violence of Pacification: State Formation and Bandits in Turkey, 1914-1937
This article discusses the changing relationship between Kurdish bandits and the Ottoman and Turkish states. Considerable research has been conducted on the impact of state formation on the establishment and maintenance of a monopoly of violence. But little is known about the state's use of outlaws for various security tasks. I address this hiatus and focus on the ebb and flow of Kurdish chieftains' relations to the state. Although these states f…
Property and family. Mobilisation for violence during the Armenian genocide
TSEG (Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis) - The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History, is het Nederlands-Vlaamse vaktijdschrift op het gebied van de sociale en economische geschiedenis
Against Massacre: Humanitarian Intervention in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914
Creative Destruction: Shaping a High-Modernist City in Interwar Turkey
This article argues that in the interwar period, the Turkish government subjected Ottoman cities to various forms of spatial planning aimed at modernizing but also ethnically homogenizing them. It draws on untapped sources to portray how the regime saw this “modernization” as a panacea that would bring the country up to par with European “civilization.” In the ideological universe of the regime, a perfect society could be forged by design and coe…
Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparison of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I
Economic Nationalism, Confiscation, and Genocide: A Comparisation of the Ottoman and Russian Empires during World War I This article analyses the development of the Ottoman and Russian governments’ economic persecution of the Armenians and Jews during World War I. It will chart how this policy moved from boycott to discrimination, into confiscation and outright plunder, resulting in economic ruination for the victims. It identifies the main curre…
Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire
Lost in commemoration: The Armenian genocide in memory and identity
It is a commonplace in Genocide Studies to say that ‘Turkey denies the Armenian genocide’. The Turkish state's official policy towards the Armenian genocide was and is indeed characterized by misrepresentation, mystification and manipulation. But when one gauges what place the Armenian genocide occupies in the social memory of Turkish society, even after nearly a century, a different picture emerges. Even though most direct eyewitnesses to the cr…
Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson
Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the viol…
Funny as hell: The functions of humour during and after genocide
The history of genocide is replete with various humorous treatments by different actors with distinctive objectives. This type of dark humour treats the topic, which is usually enveloped with solemnity, in a satirical manner. This essay aims to study the functions of humour by comparatively examining victimized individuals' and groups' use of humour during and after violent episodes such as genocide. Why do victims use humour under conditions of …
The Collapse of the Ottoman andHabsburg Empires and the Brutalisationof the Successor States
The Collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and the Brutalisation of the Successor States This essay explores the interconnected issues of demobilisation and brutalisation in the collapsing Habsburg and Ottoman empires in the period immediately after 1918. Post-imperial Austria, Hungary and Turkey witnessed the emergence of sizeable paramilitary subcultures that were shaped by the successive traumatising experiences of war, defeat, territori…
Martin Shaw, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World
Indonesia in the Global Context of Genocide and Transitional Justice
This epilogue highlights some of the main issues examined in this special issue. It argues that, compared to other cases, the scholarship on the Indonesian genocide is sophisticated and agenda-setting. We focus on the issues of organization and morphology of the 1965–66 violence, the problem of genocide denial, and questions related to transitional justice; finally, we propose promising new avenues of research
A roundtable on Max Bergholz’s Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community
KEYWORDS: Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor and Francis Book PrizeMax BergholzviolencenationalismBosnia
Debate on The Killing Season: A history of the Indonesian massacres, 1965-1966 by Geoffrey B. Robinson, with Uğur Ümit Üngör, Vannessa Hearman, Gerry van Klinken and Geoffrey Robinson
Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State
From the deserts of Sudan to the jungles of Colombia, and from the streets of Belfast to the mountains of Kurdistan, paramilitaries have appeared in violent conflicts in very different settings. Paramilitaries are generally depicted as irregular armed organizations that carry out acts of violence against civilians on behalf of a state. In doing so, they undermine the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence, while at the same time creating a breed…
Shabbiha: Paramilitary groups, mass violence and social polarization in Homs
Within a year, the Syrian uprising in March 2011 developed into a civil war that gradually escalated and within 9 years killed over half a million people, displaced half the country’s prewar population, devastated the economy, and destabilized the entire region, and even the world. The Syrian civil war split the country into four factions that were continuously at war with each other with intermittent, unstable ceasefires: the Assad regime, the v…
Introduction: Paramilitarism as a Catalyst of Perpetration
Paramilitarism is key to understanding perpetration. Many studies of civil wars, counterinsurgencies, and genocides have demonstrated the central role of paramilitaries in the perpetration of violence against civilians. The organization of paramilitarism, from the top liaisons at the helm of the state, down to the killers who commit the violence is a crucial nexus to be examined. This special issue looks into paramilitarism in four different soci…
Mass Violence and the Kurds: Introduction to the Special Issue
The Kurds’ experience with modern mass violence is long and complex. Whereas Kurds lived under the Kurdish Emirates for centuries in pre-national conditions in the Ottoman and Persian empires, the advent of nationalism and colonialism in the Middle East radically changed the situation. World War I was a watershed for most ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Kurds, and some political minorities such as Armenians and Assyrians suffered…
Political science (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Criminology (18 works) · Genocide (17 works) · History (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Ancient history (13 works) · Psychology (13 works)