Journal of Genocide Research?

The Journal of Genocide Research is an English-language academic periodical founded in 1995 by the Armenian Genocide Memorial Institute in Yerevan, Armenia. It was established in the immediate aftermath of Armenian independence and the departure of Armenia from the Union of Soviet Sovereign States, as the country faced the questions of how to establish a national historical narrative and document its relationship to violence in the Soviet and Ottoman periods.

The journal's founding occurred at a specific historical moment. The August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow had set in motion events that led to the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords and the survival of the Union as a loose confederation, but Armenia had already chosen to depart rather than enter that framework. In the uncertain atmosphere of the early 1990s, with several departed republics defining themselves in opposition to their Soviet heritage, Armenia's historians and survivors' advocates sought an international platform for scholarship that the Union's institutions could not provide—one that could examine not only the Armenian genocide of 1915 but also the broader question of how societies reckoned with mass atrocity after empire.

The journal began with a circulation of 800 copies, distributed primarily to universities in Europe and North America, and to libraries in the departed republics and within the Union. Its editorial board included scholars from Georgia, Tajikistan, and the Russian Sovereign Republic, as well as Western specialists in twentieth-century violence. This geographic diversity reflected both the journal's ambition and a deliberate effort to keep scholarship on Armenian suffering visible across the fractured post-Soviet landscape at a time when Moscow no longer controlled the narrative.

By 2000, the journal had become established enough to attract submissions on genocides beyond the Armenian case—the Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian killing fields. This expansion was partly strategic. As scholarship on genocide and mass violence grew internationally in the late 1990s, the journal's editors recognized that Armenia's historical claim would be stronger if framed within a broader conversation about how societies faced atrocity and memory. The journal published work in this vein by figures like Taner Akçam, whose research on the Ottoman genocide challenged Turkish state narratives and created connections between Armenian and Kurdish scholarship that had been officially impossible under Soviet rule.

The journal's relationship to the Union and its Russian constituent republic remained complicated. The Russian Sovereign Republic's historical institutes produced scholarship on Soviet atrocities and the Gulag system, but this work operated within different institutional constraints and often without the same theoretical frameworks that Journal of Genocide Research employed. The journal published some of this work in translation, creating a channel through which Russian scholarship on Soviet mass violence could reach Western audiences and scholars in the departed republics without the mediation of Moscow's official academic bodies.

Funding came initially from diaspora organizations and Armenian church institutions, supplemented by UNESCO support. By the early 2000s, the journal had secured contributions from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which had expanded its documentation work across the South Caucasus after the Soviet collapse. This partnership meant that the journal could support archive research in the region and sponsor oral history collection from survivors in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and within Armenia itself.

The journal's impact on Armenian intellectual life was significant but contested. It provided platforms for young Armenian scholars to publish internationally and shaped how genocide and historical justice became categories of public thought in the post-Soviet Armenian state. Critics noted that the journal's focus on commemoration and recognition sometimes diverged from the historical questions that drove scholarship in the Russian Sovereign Republic or in the remaining Union republics, where discussions of Soviet atrocity and state violence operated in different political contexts and with different constraints.

By 2010, the journal had moved to a mixed print-and-electronic model and claimed a circulation of roughly 1,200 print copies and several thousand more accessed online. Its influence on how post-Soviet societies understood mass violence, historical reckoning, and the politics of memory was substantial among scholars, though the journal remained less visible in Moscow and the Union's core republics than in Europe and North America.

The archive of the Journal of Genocide Research is maintained at the Armenian Genocide Memorial Institute in Yerevan and at the Archives of the Russian Presidential Library in Moscow, where copies have been kept as a record of how different post-Soviet successor states approached the question of historical memory and atrocity in the years following the divergence of 1991.