I gained my Ph.D. in 2009 (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. In 2008-09, I was Lecturer in International History at the Department of History of the University of Sheffield, and in 2009-10, I was Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for War Studies of University College Dublin. From 2010 to 2020, I worked at the Department of History at Utrecht University. In 2020, I was appointed Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies.

My main areas of research are state formation and nation formation, with a particular focus on mass violence in the Middle East. I am mainly interested in understanding the causes, courses, and consequences of political violence in historical and sociological perspective. My publications include Genocide: New Perspectives on its Causes, Courses and Consequences (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum, 2011) and the award-winning The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011).

I have received several awards for my work, including the Heineken Young Scientists Award for History in 2012 from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and the Praemium Erasmianum in 2010. I was an editor of the Journal of Perpetrator Research and H-Genocide, and initiator of the Syria Oral History project at NIOD. Between 2014 and 2019, I coordinated an NWO-funded VIDI project on paramilitarism, which led to the monographs Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the forthcoming Assad’s Militias and Mass Violence in Syria (Cambridge University Press, 2027). My most recent book is Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad's Prisons, 1970-2020 (I.B. Tauris, 2023).

I teach courses at the University of Amsterdam and in the Master’s Program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the NIOD Institute.

Hoe genocide begint

This Dutch-language Bachelor course focuses on the question of how and why mass violence continues to happen in the modern world. It pays attention to the international context, the ideological radicalization and intra-state power relations between political elites, and the fate of individual perpetrators and victims. Finally, it discusses denial and recognition, punishment and prevention in a comparative way. After an introductory lecture, three important cases of mass political violence are discussed in more detail: Cambodia, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia.

Mass violence in the Middle East

This English-language Master’s course approaches mass violence as a historical and sociological problem relating to processes of state building and nation building in the postcolonial era that have caused strong changes in countries such as Syria and Iraq. These changes underlie both integration and cooperation, as well as segmentation and confrontation, resulting from the Cold War in the region, the rise of authoritarian regimes, wars with neighboring countries, and internal conflicts that were often exceptionally violent. How and why did Syria and Iraq become such violent societies? This course takes a panoramic and in-depth look into the rise of the Baathist regimes in Damascus and Baghdad, and the limitless violence they visited upon their societies in the past half century. It uses secondary literature, primary sources, oral histories, and social media content to examine the causes, courses, and consequences of mass political violence in the region.

Current PhD students

Amir Taha, “Resisting Saddam: The 1991 Uprising and its Suppression”

Khaled Abu Salah, “Sectarianized State Violence in Homs, Syria, 2011-14”

Academic articles

“How the Syrian Conflict Shaped Mass Violence Research”, in: Syria Studies, vol.16, no.1 (2025), pp.126-137.

"Screaming, silence, and mass violence in Israel/Palestine", in: Journal of Genocide Research, vol.26, no.1 (2024), at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2024.2309709

“The Tadamon Massacre: Archiving Violence through the Perpetrators’ Gaze”, in: Visual Anthropology, vol.37, no.1 (2024), pp.56-73.

“Undercover etnografie en daderonderzoek in Syrië”, in: Kwalon, vol.26, no.3 (2021), pp.181-191.

“Shabbiha: Paramilitary groups, mass violence and social polarization in Homs”, in: Violence, vol.1, no.1 (2020), 59-79.

“On the Multiple Uses of Video Footage among Contemporary Perpetrators”, in: Journal of Perpetrator Research, vol.2, no.2 (2019), 207-215.

Roundtable on Max Bergholz’ Violence as a Generative Force, in: Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, vol.60 (2018), 311-33.

“Dersim 1938: A Genocide of Modernity”, in: Wiener Jahrbuch für Kurdische Studien, vol.6 (2017), pp.48-55.

“The Armenian Genocide: The Local, the National, and the Global”, in: Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly, vol.144 (2018), pp.76-87.

“Kurdish Involvement in the Armenian Genocide, 1915 and beyond”, in: Wiener Jahrbuch für Kurdische Studien, vol.3 (2015), pp.11-23.

“On Memory, Identity, and Genocide”, in: Testimony, vol.120, no.1 (2015), pp.51-61.

“Funny as Hell: The Functions of Humor during and after Genocide”, co-authored with Valerie Amandine Verkerke, in: European Journal of Humour Research, vol.3 (2015), pp.80-101.

“The Collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires and the Brutalization of the Successor States”, co-authored with Robert Gerwarth, in: Journal of Modern European History, vol.13, no.2 (2015), pp.226-48.

“Αυτοκρατορική Αποκάλυψη. Η κατάρρευση της Οθωμανικής και της Αυστροουγγρική: Αυτοκρατορίας και η κυριαρχία της βίας στα διάδοχα κράτη”, co-authored with Robert Gerwarth, in: Επιστήμη και Κοινωνία, vol.32 (2014), pp.17-58.

“Confiscation and Violence: A Comparison of Ottoman and Russian Economic Persecution in World War I”, co-authored with Eric Lohr, in: Journal of Modern European History, vol.12, no.4 (2014), pp.500-22.

“Lost in Commemoration: The Armenian Genocide in Memory and Identity”, in: Patterns of Prejudice, vol.48, no.2 (2014), pp.147-66.

“Mass Violence in Syria: A Preliminary Analysis”, in: New Middle Eastern Studies, vol.3 (2013), at: http://www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/archives/1161

“Property and Family: Mobilisation for Violence during the Armenian Genocide”, in: Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, vol.10, no.4 (2013), pp.96-118.

“A Straw Man, a Dead Horse, and a Genocide”, in: Armenian Review, vol.54, no.1-2 (2013), pp.79-92.

“The Armenian Genocide: A Multi-Dimensional Process of Destruction”, in: Global Dialogue, vol.15, no.1 (2013), available at: http://www.worlddialogue.org/contentuser.php?id=551

“Creative Destruction: Shaping the High-Modernist City in Interwar Turkey”, in: Journal of Urban History, vol.39, no.2 (2013), pp.297-314.

“Studying Mass Violence: Pitfalls, Problems and Promises”, in: Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol.7, no.1 (2012), pp.68-80.

Translated as: “Estudios sobre violencia masiva: obstáculos, problemas y promesas”, in: Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio, vol.6 (2012), pp.9-23.

“Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and Persecution in the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1923”, in: War in History, vol.19, no.2 (2012), pp.173-92.

“Untying the Tongue-Tied: Cultural and Linguistic Genocide as Population Politics”, in: International Journal for the Sociology of Language, vol.217 (2012), pp.127-50.

“Rethinking the Violence of Pacification: State Formation and Bandits in the Young Turk Era, 1914-1937”, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.54, no.4 (2012), pp.746-69.

“The Armenian Genocide: New Sources and Research Directions”, in: Haigazian Armenological Review, vol.31 (June 2011), pp.9-32.

“Team America: Genocide Prevention?”, in: Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol.6, no.1 (2011), pp.32-38.

“Collaboration in Genocide: Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916; Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941-1944; and Rwanda, 1994”, co-authored with Anton Weiss-Wendt, in: Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol.25, no.3 (Winter, 2011), pp.404-37.

“Inleiding: Massaal Geweld in de Twintigste Eeuw”, in: Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, vol.124, no.4 (2011), pp.440-7.

“Diyarbekir (1915-1916): Young Turk Mass Killings at the Provincial Level”, in: Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, at: http://www.massviolence.org (25 March 2009), 18 pp..

“Research Note: History and Memory in Inter-Ethnic and Inter-State Relations”, in: Україна Модерна, vol.9, no.4 (2009), pp.35-9.

“Seeing like a Nation-State: Young Turk Social Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913-1950”, in: Journal of Genocide Research, vol.10, no.1 (2008), pp.15-39.

“Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Towards a New Understanding of Young Turk Social Engineering”, in: European Journal of Turkish Studies (2008), at: http://www.ejts.org/document2583.html, 30 pp..

“When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: the Processive Nature of Genocide”, in: Genocide Studies and Prevention, vol.1, no.2 (2006), pp.173-96.

“‘Justifier l’injustifiable’: Ideologie en Genocide in Rwanda (1994)”, in: Vrede en Veiligheid, vol.33, no.3 (2004), pp.342-58.

“Ana Hatlarıyla Soykırım (Jenosid)”, in: Munzur: Dersim Etnografya Dergisi, vol.11 (2002), pp.5-23.

Book chapters

“Militias in Metropolis: Paramilitaries, State, and Crime in Assad’s Syria”, in: Oxford Handbook of Urban Violence,

“Contested Territory: Anatolia as Myth, Map, and Mechanism of State Power in Turkey”, in: Ritienne Gauci & Godfrey Baldacchino (eds.), Peninsulas: A Geography of Almost Islands (London: Routledge, 2027), pp.112-39.

“Paramilitarism in Syria and Iraq: The Interpenetration of Militias and the State”, in: Aziz Al-Azmeh, Harout Akdedian & Haian Dukhan (eds.), Spoils of War in the Arab East: Reconditioning Society and Polity in Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2023), pp.59-74.

“A Multifront War of Narratives: The Assad Regime's Emerging Denialism”, in: Bedross Der Matossian (ed.), Denial of Genocides in the Twenty-First Century (Omaha, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2023), pp.317-52. (with Annsar Shahhoud)

“Alawite Warrior-Sheikhs: Ali Khizam and the Specter of Sectarian Violence in Syria”, in: Stephen Smith & Sara Brown (eds.), The Routledge Handbook on Religion and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2021), pp.56-66.

“Violence against Kurds in the Turkish Republic”, in: Joost Jongerden (ed.), The Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Turkey (London: Routledge, 2021), 24-36. (with Ayhan Işık)

“Assad’s Paramilitaries: Shabbiha Perpetrators in the Syrian Civil War”, in: Kjell Anderson & Erin Jessee (eds.), Researching Perpetrators of Genocide (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 137-56.

“Non-State Actors as Perpetrators of Atrocity Crimes”, in: Barbora Hola et al. (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Atrocity Crimes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 373-92.

“Eurocentrism in Research on Mass Violence”, in: Marjet Brolsma, Robin de Bruin & Matthijs Lok (eds.), Eurocentrism in European History and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 65-77.

“From Perpetrators to Perpetration: Definition, Typologies, and Processes”, in: Susanne Knittel & Zack Goldberg (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Perpetrator Studies (New York: Routledge, 2019), 7-22.

“Perpetration as a Process: A Historical-Sociological Model”, in: Alette Smeulers (ed.), Perpetrators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp.117-31.

“Giriş”, in: Adnan Çelik & Namık Kemal Dinç (eds.), 1915 Diyarbekir: Yüz Yıllık Ah: Toplumsal Hafızanın İzinde (Istanbul: İsmail Beşikçi Vakfı, 2018), 7-10.

“How Armenian was the 1915 Genocide?”, in: David Gaunt et al. (eds.), Sayfo: The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Berghahn, 2017), pp.33-51.

“Becoming and Unbecoming Refugees: The Long Ordeal of Balkan Muslims, 1912-1934”, in: Peter Gatrell (ed.), Europe on the Move: the Great War and its Refugees, 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp.304-27.

“Cultural Genocide: Destruction of Material and Immaterial Human Culture”, in: Cathie Carmichael & Richard Maguire (eds.), The Routledge History of Genocide (London: Routledge, 2015), pp.241-53.

“Genocide and the End of the Ottoman Empire”, in: Cathie Carmichael & Richard Maguire (eds.), The Routledge History of Genocide (London: Routledge, 2015), chapter 19.

“The Destruction of the Other as the Validation of the Self”, in: Samuel Totten (ed.), Advancing Genocide Studies: Personal Accounts and Insights from Scholars in the Field (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015), 35-53.

“Explaining Regional Variations in the Armenian Genocide”, in: Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem & Maurus Reinkowski (ed.), World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), pp.240-61.

“Mass Violence against Civilians during the Balkan Wars”, in: William Mulligan, Andreas Rose & Dominik Geppert (eds.), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp.76-91.

“The Armenian Genocide in the Context of Twentieth-Century Paramilitarism”, in: Alexis Demirdjian (ed.), The Armenian Genocide at the Centennial (London: Palgrave, 2015), pp.11-25.

“Savaş, Tehcir, Soykırım”, in: Oktay Özel & Fikret Adanır (eds.), 1915: Siyaset, Tehcir, Soykırım (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2015), pp.357-76.

“De Armeense genocide, 1915”, in: Henk van der Linden & Perry Pierik (eds.), Het dramatische jaar 1915: Verloren onschuld (Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2014), pp. 293-323.

“Genocide and Property: Root Cause or Concomitant Effect?”, in: Bert Ingelaere, Stephan Parmentier, Jacques Haers, Barbara Segaert (eds.), Genocide, Risk and Resilience: An Interdisciplinary Approach (London: Palgrave, 2013), pp.178-89.

“Disastrous Decade: Armenians and Kurds under Young Turk Rule, 1915-25,” in: Joost Jongerden (ed.), Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870-1915 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp.267-95.

“Paramilitary Violence in the Collapsing Ottoman Empire”, in: Robert Gerwarth & John Horne (eds.), War in Peace: Paramilitary Violence after the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.162-81. Translated to German, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbian, Italian, Finnish, Hungarian.

“The Armenian Genocide, 1915”, in: Barbara Boender & Wichert ten Have (ed.), The Holocaust and Other Genocides: An Introduction (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp.45-71.

Translated as: “De Armeense Genocide, 1915”, in: Barbara Boender & Wichert ten Have (red.), De Holocaust en Andere Genociden: Een Inleiding (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), pp.45-71.

“‘Turkey for the Turks’: Demographic Engineering in Eastern Anatolia, 1914-1945”, in: Ronald G. Suny & Fatma M. Göçek (eds.), A Question of Genocide, 1915: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp.287-305.

“Fresh Understandings of the Armenian Genocide: Mapping New Terrain with Old Questions”, in: Adam Jones (ed.), New Directions in Genocide Research (London: Routledge, 2011), pp.197-213.

“Seeing like a Nation-State: Young Turk Social Engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913-1950”, in: Dominik J. Schaller & Jürgen Zimmerer (eds.), Late Ottoman Genocides: The Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish Population and Extermination Policies (London: Routledge, 2009), pp.9-33.

“Oorlog en Genocide in het Ottomaanse Rijk, 1912-1922”, in: Perry Pierik (ed.), Ten Oorlog (Soesterberg: Aspekt, 2009), pp.383-438.

“Genocide en lokale elites: over massaal geweld in Turkije, 1913-1918”, in: Ward Berenschot & Bert Schijf (eds.), Etnisch Geweld: Groepsconflict in de Schaduw van de Staat (Amsterdam: Boom, 2009), pp.27-52.

“Recalling the Appalling: Mass Violence in Eastern Turkey in the Twentieth Century”, in: Nanci Adler, Selma Leydesdorff & Leyla Neyzi (eds.), Memories of Mass Repression (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2008), pp.175-98.

“Stratégies de survie au cours du génocide des arméniens”, in: Jacques Sémelin, Claire Andrieu, Sarah Gensburger (eds.), La résistance aux génocides: De la pluralité des actes de sauvetage (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008), pp.221-32.

Translated as: “Conversion and Rescue: Survival Strategies in the Armenian Genocide”, in: Jacques Semelin, Claire Andrieu, Sarah Gensburger (eds.), Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp.201-17.

“Center and Periphery in the Armenian Genocide: The Case of Diyarbekir Province”, in: Hans-Lukas Kieser & Elmar Plozza (ed.), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern, die Türkei und Europa: The Armenian Genocide, Turkey and Europe (Zürich: Chronos, 2006), pp.71-88.

“De Vernietiging van Dersim (1938) in Beeld”, in: Ton Zwaan (ed.), Politiek Geweld: Etnisch Conflict, Oorlog en Genocide in de Twintigste Eeuw (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, Zestiende Jaarboek NIOD, 2005), pp.135-60.

“Armenocide: De Vergeten Genocide van de Eerste Wereldoorlog”, in: Hans Andriessen (ed.), De Grote Oorlog: Kroniek 1914-1918 (Amsterdam: Aspekt, 2004), pp.57-102.