Awards

• Joint winner of Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies 2019 (United States)

Overview

Over the past two decades, many states have heard demands that they 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, Jennifer M. Dixon 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. Her book 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.

Full Product Details

9781501776052

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Reviews

"Dark Pasts is not only a fascinating account of Turkish and Japanese narrative change; it also valuably contributes to scholarship on what makes certain forms of politics possible and impossible in varying contexts... helps us understand not only why states struggle with contrition, but also how international legitimacy seeking tempers nationalist glorification of human rights abuses. -- ""Journal of Genocide Research"" Dark Pasts represents an important advancement in the study of atrocities, state memory, and international norms. This book will be of value to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in human rights and questions of post-conflict justice more generally, as well as Turkey and Japan more specifically. -- ""Nations and Nationalism"" Dark Pasts will be a reference for studies of memory politics in all parts of the world with troubled pasts. The book's excellence in collecting and analyzing archival and interview data should guide historically informed social science scholarship. The theoretical framework and the findings give scholars of history, memory, human rights, nationalism, and international relations much to think about and debate. -- ""Nationalities Papers"" Dixon has made an extremely valuable contribution to the growing and vibrant literature on the politics of memory and apology. Dark Pasts deserves to be widely read in the scholarly community and is sure to find use in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate courses. -- ""Perspectives on Politics"" Dixon offers valuable insights into how a country addresses its past horrors. This book offers some reassurance to those who fight for change, demonstrating that their efforts can be effective. -- ""Choice"" Jennifer Dixon has made a substantive contribution to the study of state narratives with Dark Pasts.... In this elegant and riveting book, Dixon develops a causal model of narrative change for state denial or apology for atrocities committed against civilians.... Dixon's range of methods...makes her own storytelling in the book emotionally vibrant and thus eminently readable, while also being rigorously supported with empirical evidence. -- ""Political Psychology"" Jennifer Dixon...has written a path-breaking book that is a model of scholarship, one rich in both detail and analysis, and beautifully written. -- ""Genocide Studies International"" The book powerfully demonstrates how Japan and Turkey have walked the tightrope of maintaining ""plausibility and legitimacy"". Through interviews with diplomats and analysts and the exploration of textbooks, newspapers, and other publications, Dixon distills more than fifty years' worth of official narrative in two states five thousand miles apart into a well-argued, systematic analysis of governments' struggles with uncomfortable truths. -- ""H-Diplo"" The official narratives of Turkey and Japan in regard to their respective 'dark pasts, ' like Dixon's book cover, are both deceptively aesthetic on the surface while containing many layers. Dixon unpacks them well. -- ""The Armenian Weekly"""

Author Information

Jennifer M. Dixon is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Villanova University. She has published articles in Perspectives on Politics, South European Society and Politics, and International Journal of Middle East Studies.

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