Research

Publications

Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018; paperback in 2024).

Abstract: Over the past two decades, many states have been called on to recognize and apologize for historic wrongs. Such calls have not elicited uniform or predictable responses. While some states have apologized for past crimes, others continue to silence, deny, and relativize dark pasts. What explains the tremendous variation in how states deal with past crimes? When and why do states change the stories they tell about their dark pasts?

Dark Pasts argues that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in official narratives about dark pasts, but domestic considerations determine the content of such change. Rather than simply changing with the passage of time, persistence, or rightness, official narratives of dark pasts are shaped by interactions between political factors at the domestic and international levels. Unpacking the complex processes through which international pressures and domestic dynamics shape states’ narratives, Dark Pasts analyzes the trajectories over the past sixty years of Turkey’s narrative of the 1915–17 Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. While both states’ narratives started from similar positions of silencing, relativizing, and denial, Japan has come to express regret and apologize for the Nanjing Massacre, while Turkey has continued to reject official wrongdoing and deny the genocidal nature of the violence. 

Combining historical richness and analytical rigor, Dark Pasts unravels the complex processes through which such narratives are constructed and contested, and offers an innovative way to analyze narrative change. It sheds light on the persistent presence of the past and reveals how domestic politics functions as a filter that shapes the ways in which states’ narratives change—or do not—over time. 

Dark Pasts was awarded the 2019 Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies. 

“Rethinking Norm Change: Content and Strength in Norm Development” (with Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch), in Antje Wiener and Phil Orchard, eds., Contesting the World: Norm Research in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024).

“Conceptualizing and Assessing Norm Strength in International Relations” (with Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch), European Journal of International Relations, vol. 27, no. 2 (2021), pp. 521-47, available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354066120949628. Awarded the Outstanding Article Award from APSA's International History and Politics Section.

Abstract: What constitutes a strong or a weak norm? Scholars often refer to strong or weak, or strengthening or weakening norms, yet there are widespread inconsistencies in terminology and no agreed-upon measures. This has hindered the accumulation of knowledge and made it difficult to test competing hypotheses about norm development and contestation. To address these conceptual problems and their analytical implications, this article conceptualizes norm strength as the extent of collective expectations related to a principled idea and proposes two indicators to assess a norm’s strength: the level of international concordance with a principled idea, and the degree of international institutionalization of a principled idea. The article illustrates the applicability and utility of the proposed conceptualization by evaluating the strengths of two transitional justice norms: the norm of legal accountability and the norm of truth-seeking. In so doing, the article resolves empirical disputes over the origins and status of these norms. In particular, the analysis reveals that while legal accountability became a norm in the early 1990s and is today a strong norm, truth-seeking emerged later and remains a weak norm. More generally, the proposed framework should advance existing debates about norm contestation, localization, violation, and erosion.

“Multidisciplinarity and Comparison in the Study of Dark Pasts,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 23, no. 3 (2021), pp. 457-65, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2020.1800180.

"Rhetorical Adaptation and Resistance to International Norms," Perspectives on Politics, vol. 15, no. 1 (March 2017), pp. 83-99, available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/div-classtitlerhetorical-adaptation-and-resistance-to-international-normsdiv/86F110FE41360BDD911ACBBB87AD6E54. Awarded the Mary Parker Follett Prize for the best article on Politics and History by APSA’s Politics and History section.

Abstract:  Scholarship on states’ responses to international norms has focused on commitment, compliance, and noncompliance; paying insufficient attention to responses that fall outside these categories. Beyond simply complying with or violating a norm; states contest, resist, and respond to international norms in a range of ways. I identify rhetorical adaptation as a central form of resistance to international norms. Rather than simply rejecting a norm or charges of norm violation, such a strategy draws on a norm’s content to resist pressures for compliance or minimize perceptions of violation. Theorizing the relationship between norms’ content and states’ resistant rhetoric, I identify four types of rhetorical adaptation: norm disregard, norm avoidance, norm interpretation, and norm signaling. To probe the plausibility of these propositions, a case study of Turkey’s post-World War II narrative of the Armenian Genocide traces a sequence of rhetorical adaptations over the past six decades. Building on the case study, I then draw out generalizable insights into the uses and effects of rhetorical adaptation. Connecting theoretical concerns in political science with the interdisciplinary fields of genocide studies and memory studies, I delineate the ways in which actors instrumentally use norms and expand understandings of the forms and effects of so-called norm takers’ agency.

"Norms, Narratives, and Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide," International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 47, no. 4 (October 2015), pp. 796–800, available at: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=10005137&fulltextType=DS&fileId=S0020743815001002. 

"Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide: Change within Continuity," in Annette Becker, et al., eds., Le Génocide des Arméniens: Cent Ans de Recherche 1915-2015 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015), pp. 249–56.  [Available here: https://villanova.academia.edu/JenniferDixon.]

"Defending the Nation? Maintaining Turkey's Narrative of the Armenian Genocide," South European Society and Politics, vol. 15, no. 3 (Sept. 2010), pp. 467-85, available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13608746.2010.513605#.VDHJzec-Cxo.

Abstract: This paper focuses on two recent periods in which agents of the Turkish state actively defended Turkey’s official narrative of the Armenian genocide.  I argue that the set of strategies developed by Turkish officers and bureaucrats under the military regime in power from 1980 to 1983 established a pattern of state response that was replicated by bureaucratic elites in the face of new challenges to the official narrative two decades later.  Understanding this authoritarian legacy helps explain the mechanisms by which and repertoire of action through which agents of the Turkish state have defended and re-produced its official narrative.

"Education and National Narratives: Changing Representations of the Armenian Genocide in History Textbooks in Turkey," The International Journal for Education Law and Policy, Special Issue on "Legitimation and Stability of Political Systems: The Contribution of National Narratives" (2010), pp. 103-26.  [See below to download a copy of this article.]

Abstract: Over the past several decades, Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian genocide has come under increasing scrutiny, both domestically and internationally.  In response, state officials have defended and adapted the official version of events, repeatedly turning to the educational system as one of a set of channels through which the state’s narrative is disseminated.  This article analyses changes in the official narrative of the ‘Armenian question’ in Turkish high school history textbooks over the past half-century, and identifies the domestic and international factors that have influenced these changes.  The first part of the article sets up the context, briefly outlining the history of the genocide, highlighting institutional and ideational reasons for the silencing of this part of Turkey’s past, and describing the role of education in the creation of Turkish citizens. The second section traces how the ‘Armenian question’ has been presented in Turkish history textbooks, describing the content of the narrative within four different historical phases, and highlighting the changes between each of these phases.  Finally, the last section discusses the domestic and international pressures that account for these shifts in the narrative.

Work in Progress

On The Rights Trajectory: International Norm Development and the Post-World War II Human Rights Regime (with Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch), book project, research and drafting in progress

Abtract: When does a principled idea become an international norm? And how do international norms change and develop over time and space? Over the past three decades, international norms scholarship has made great advances in our understanding of the nature, causes, and effects of the international normative environment. And yet, it also features a high degree of conceptual idiosyncrasy and lacks a shared conceptual framework for studying norm development. These shortcomings have hampered the accumulation of knowledge in the study of norms and stymied the ability to provide much-needed empirical assessments and methodological tools to assess the origins, trajectory, and current status of international norms. This book manuscript in progress introduces a conceptual model of norm development and uses a mixed-methods analysis of the development over time of five core international human rights norms: the prescriptive norms of legal accountability, truth-seeking, and reparations; and the prohibitive norms against genocide and torture. Combined, the study of these five norms seeks to assess the development and status of the international human rights regime from 1945 to the present. 

“The State of Repair: Tracing the Content and Strength of the International Norm of Reparations” (with Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch), working paper, draft in progress

Abstract: The practice of reparations is a key element in the transitional justice normative regime, which embodies principled ideas about the value and importance of seeking justice, truth, and repair in the aftermath of violence and human rights violations. In the decades since the precedent-setting German reparations program for Nazi atrocities (the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement), there have been significant changes in expectations about and practices regarding reparations, which refers to the principled idea that a responsible party should pay monetary or financial compensation to victim(s) of gross human rights violations. There is, however, a substantial lack of consensus about the timing and substance of these changes, as well as about its strength and content today. This chapter traces and evaluates the development of the international norm of reparations over the past seventy-five years, analyzing changes over this period in its content and its strength. While existing scholarship points to five content changes in the practice of reparations over the post-World War II period, our analysis suggests that not all of these changes in practices are reflected in collective expectations about appropriate forms of repair in response to atrocity. The chapter also assesses changes in the norm’s strength over the course of the post-World War II period, finding that the norm is moderately strong with moderate concordance and low to moderate institutionalization. 

“The Instrumental Uses of Norms in World Politics” (with Jennifer L. Erickson), working paper

Abstract:  Instrumental decisions about the content, spread, and uses of norms are central to international politics. Yet while constructivist and rationalist scholars have explored aspects of the instrumental uses of norms, their work has not yet produced a coherent research agenda. This paper introduces a systematic conceptual framework with which to study the instrumental uses of norms in world politics. We identify and conceptualize two types of instrumental-normative action: Norms-as-means instrumentalism is the strategic use of norms to achieve policy goals or other desired ends, and norms-as-ends instrumentalism is the strategic use of rhetoric or behavior to shape the content or strength of a norm itself, or an actor’s compliance with it. Together, we argue that these types capture the ways in which social and instrumental rationales interact to shape how and why actors use international norms. In addition, the paper theorizes the structural context of instrumental-normative action and discusses its effects on actors, outcomes, and the normative structure of the international system. By providing a framework for more fully and systematically incorporating norms into analyses of power politics and international relations, this paper sheds light on processes of norm development, the complexity of norms’ influence in international politics, and the ways in which social context shapes rationality.