Spectral Legacies

This chapter offers a consideration of the fragmentary legal aftermaths of the 1915 Armenian genocide. As an event that precedes the Holocaust but has not achieved as clear and conclusive a legal framing, this first genocide of the twentieth century complicates easy presumptions about law’s mastery over violence, highlighting law’s coimplications with violence in distinctive ways. The chapter proceeds through tracing the fore- and afterlives of the 1921 Berlin trial of Soghomon Tehlirian and presents a sketch of the legal processes and violent events that the Tehlirian trial was haunted by, and those that it came to haunt. It then focuses on one such event in more detail: the 2007 assassination of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul. If Dink’s assassination brought back the specter of Talât’s assassination, it also brought back the specters of the Armenian genocide, with Dink often figured, in numerous memorial protest-events held since his death, as one more victim of the genocide. Significantly, law is also implicated in this spectral return: The process of judicial harassment leading to Dink’s assassination and its labyrinthine legal aftermath speaks of the ways in which genocidal violence continues to haunt the legal order as its unspeakable foundation.