Internal displacement has replaced the flows of border-crossing refugees as the major form of forced migration across the world in the past two decades. International organizations seek to have a central role in providing assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) although this phenomenon comes under the traditional realm of state sovereignty, in contrast to the refugee regime, which is part of international law. The evolving international IDP regime has triggered policy and scholarly debates about various aspects of state responsibility and international assistance. On one hand, when states fail to provide protection to the displaced, the decision to take international action is often selective and depends to a large extent on the balance of geopolitical interests of powerful donor states. On the other hand, extant international humanitarian assistance practices also face criticism for having created new modes of power over displaced groups.
A century after the Armenian Genocide and its ongoing denial by the Turkish state, there has emerged a notable and unprecedented interest in the Armenian past and present both in civil society discourse and scholarship in Turkey, accompanied by various reconciliation iniatives at the state and society levels. Observers have suggested that this increased engagement with Turkey's suppressed past is an outcome of its EU candidacy, the democratization reforms of the early 2000s, and the shockwave among liberal segments of Turkish society caused by the 2007 assassination of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. I argue that this shortsighted analysis, which completely ignores the Kurdish movement's transformative challenge to Turkish denialism since the 1980s, echoes the key fallacy of present discussions of Turkey's engagement with its past: compartmentalization and disjunction of interlinked state crimes.
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