Paper Short Abstract:

Given the destruction and inaccessibility of public archives of the Armenian genocide, this paper discusses the relation between dispossession, property forms, different archives and the politics of repair by focusing on the (ironic) potential of private company archives.

Paper Abstract:

The Armenian genocide of 1915-x not only involved the murder of about 1,5 million Armenians, but it also entailed a programme of comprehensive dispossession by way of so-called commissions for abandoned property. Interestingly, these commissions emerged out of legal interventions that secured expropriation while officially upholding the victims’ rights to their private property, if converted into monetary value. While murdered in real life, Armenians thus retained a ghostly presence as proprietary rights-holders in the archives of the commissions and other institutions such as the cadaster office. The late Ottoman state meanwhile reached the limits of its power to capture Armenian wealth at the threshold of foreign or internationally operating private companies, including banks and insurance companies, many of which retained the assets of their dead clients. In the early 2000s however, descendants of survivors launched two class action law suits in California against two life insurance companies, resulting in a settlement. Further attempts have so far been thwarted due to geopolitical reasons. In this to some extent speculative paper, I explore this complex relation between property forms, the different kinds of archives (notably state and private company) across which they span and the potential and politics of contestation and repair more than a hundred years after the genocide. In particular, I want to think about the (ironic, possibly) potential of private company archives as sites of restitution, compensation and repair given their relative seclusion and protection from the destructive politics of denial by the Turkish state.