Vortrag von Alice von Bieberstein (Humboldt Universität Berlin)

Alice von Bieberstein will present her book Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey. It explores the afterlife of the Armenian genocide as a moment of primitive accumulation that fundamentally shaped Turkey’s political economy, particularly through its role in the emergence of a racialized property regime. Across different sites and practices in Turkish Kurdistan, from urban renewal projects to hunting for 'Armenian treasures‘ and heritage tourism, it ethnographically traces the recursive movement of a form of ’sovereign accumulation’ that builds on and re-animates the Armenian genocide in the 21st century for projects of valorization and extraction, against the background of a long century of political violence and genocide denial.