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The ARF at 120: The History and Ideology
Friday, November 19th, 2010
by Asbarez
This year marks the 120th anniversary of the founding of Armenian
Revolutionary Federation-one of the oldest and most influential
political organizations in Armenian history. On this occasion, the USC
Institute of Armenian Studies and the Armenian Review have organized a
commemorative academic conference on the ARF's history, current
activities and future prospects.
The conference titled `The ARF at 120: History in the Making' will be
held on December 4 at the Davidson Conference Center on the campus of
University of Southern California (Driving Directions). The conference
will critically examine such key issues as socioeconomic aspects of
ARF's activities in Armenia; role of women in the ARF; the challenge
of functioning as state-based political party and a Diaspora-wide
political movement; and assessments of historical developments and
issues of current relevance.
The day-long event will feature academics, researchers, professionals
and activists from Armenia, the Middle East, Europe and the United
States, who will present nuanced and multi-disciplinary analyses of
ARF's activities in celebration of its 120th anniversary.
The conference will be webcasted live on the day of the event on
arf120.com. The event is free and open to the public but the
organizers are strongly recommending attendees register ahead of time.
Register online at arf120.com.
Today, we introduce the speakers and present some of the topics to be
addressed during the first panel of the conference, titled `ARF in
History and Ideology.'
Richard Hovannisian (Moderator)
Prof. Hovannisian was born and raised in Tulare, California. He
received his BA (1954) and MA (1958) degrees from the University of
California, Berkeley, and his PhD (1966) from University of
California, Los Angeles. He was an Associate Professor of History at
Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, from 1966 to 1969. In 1987,
Professor Hovannisian was appointed as the first holder of the
Armenian Educational Foundation Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian
History at the UCLA. Hovanissian is a Guggenheim Fellow who has
received numerous honors for his scholarship, civic activities, and
advancement of Armenian Studies. His biographical entries are included
in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World among other
scholarly and literary reference works.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Houri Berberian
Houri Berberian is Professor of Middle Eastern History at California
State University, Long Beach, where she also serves as Director of the
Middle Eastern Studies Program. She is the author of a number of
articles and a book, Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional
Revolution of 1905-1911: `The Love for Freedom Has No Fatherland'
(2001).
Connected Revolutions: The ARF and Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian
Revolutions in the Early Twentieth Century
Using the concept of `connected histories,' this paper explores the
Ottoman, Iranian, and Russian Revolutions of the early twentieth
century through the circulation, interaction, and relationships of
Armenian revolutionary elites, particularly Dashnaks, who
simultaneously operated in each of these political and social
upheavals. This study is interested in the connectedness of all three
revolutions, which have helped shape the history of the states and
societies in which they occurred. One of the most interesting and
significant aspects about the three revolutions occurring
approximately at the same time in regions bordering each other is the
circulation and flow of revolutionary elites, activists, and
intellectuals as well as revolutionary literature and arms throughout
the three regions before and during the revolutions. In the case of
the Dashnaks, they traveled from one Armenian community to another in
the Ottoman, Russian, and Qajar empires, taking advantage of a network
of already established political party branches or communities of
like-minded activists. Dashnaks played an interesting and at times
important role in the events leading to revolutions in the Russian,
Ottoman, and Iranian empires and in the course of the revolutions
themselves.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elke Hartmann
Elke Hartmann, has studied History and Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies
in Berlin specializing on Modern Ottoman history. Her MA thesis
examines the German military mission to the Ottoman Empire during the
reign of Abdulhamid II, while her dissertation analyzes conscription
in the late Ottoman Empire in the context of modern state and nation
building. The topic of her current research within the research group
`Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective' at Free University in
Berlin are the memoirs of Armenian fedayis, focusing mainly on Roupen
Der Minasian's `Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary.'
`The Turks and Kurds are our fate`: ARF Concepts and Strategies of Self-Defense
Roupen Der Minasian, fedayi, minister in the first Armenian republic
and member of the ARF Bureau, was undoubtedly one of the important
figures in the ARF in the first decades of the 20th century that were
so crucial in Armenian history. But Roupen's prominent status among
contemporary ARF leaders is the result especially of his writings. His
memoirs, printed in seven volumes and totaling more than 2,700 pages,
is the most voluminous single report about life in Western Armenia
before the Armenian Genocide and the fedayi movement in particular. In
this paper they will serve as a starting point for the analysis of ARF
concepts and strategies of self-defense in Ottoman Western Armenia.
The paper gives a short introduction to Roupen's `Memoirs of an
Armenian Revolutionary' as a first-person narrative, followed by a
summary of what this text tells us about Armenian self-defense. The
`Memoirs' reflect the differences within the party and between Eastern
(Russian) and Western (Ottoman) Armenian functionaries. They are
testimony of Roupen's own position of extreme pragmatism. They show
that the ARF self-defense agenda went beyond armed struggle, also
including political methods, notably the cooperation with the Young
Turkish movement. But, most importantly, Roupen's memoirs point out
the Ottoman context of the Armenian fedayi movement.
Accordingly, in its main part, this paper offers an analysis of the
ARF self-defense, placing it in the context of the Ottoman system of
administration and rule in its Eastern provinces and of the local and
regional power relations in the Eastern Ottoman borderlands. This
paper argues that the Armenian fedayis and the ARF were themselves
part of the highly complex tangle that characterized Ottoman rule in
the Western Armenian provinces, becoming one of the actors involved
locally in controlling the villages and their populations, Armenian
and non-Armenian alike.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ara Sanjian
Ara Sanjian is an Associate Professor of Armenian and Middle Eastern
History and the Director of the Armenian Research Center at the
University of Michigan-Dearborn. From 1986 to 1991, he studied for his
master's degree in history at Yerevan State University. From 1991 to
1994 he did his PhD in modern history of the Middle East at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London. From 1996
to 2005, he was the Chairman of the Department of Armenian Studies,
History and Political Science at Haigazian University in Beirut. His
research interests focus on the post-World War I history of Armenia,
Turkey, and the Arab states of Western Asia. He is the author of
Turkey and Her Arab Neighbors, 1953-1958: A Study in the Origins and
Failure of the Baghdad Pact (2001), as well as a monograph and a
number of scholarly articles. He is currently working on a book-length
project on the Armenian quest for Mountainous Karabagh under Soviet
rule in 1923-1987.
The ARF & Land Reform in Eastern Armenia, 1917-1920
The paper will discuss the ideological position taken and the policies
implemented by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) as regards
the introduction of land reform in Transcaucasia and Armenia in
particular from the February Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the
sovietization of Armenia in late 1920. It thus covers the successive
interim, Transcaucasian regional administrations - the Ozakom, the
Commissariat, and the Seim - followed by the periods of the
independent Transcaucasian Federation (1918) and the independent
Republic of Armenia (1918-1920).
The paper is based on research conducted in the documents of the
legislature, the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Agriculture
and State Properties of the Republic of Armenia (1918-1920), all
housed at present in the National Archives of Armenia in Yerevan, plus
on an extensive use of Armenian language newspapers and periodicals
published between 1917 and 1920 in Yerevan, Etchmiadzin, Kars, Shushi,
Baku, Tiflis and Akhaltsikhe.
The paper will argue that the ARF considered itself as the carrier of
the ideals and social and political objectives of the February
Revolution of 1917, even after the proclamation of Armenia's
independence the following year. As the ruling political party, it
remained committed to the eventual socialization of land in Armenia,
although successive internal and external political crises permitted
only the adoption and implementation of some interim measures toward
that end.
With the collapse of the independent Armenian state, the leaders of
the ARF were forced into exile, where they were obliged to adjust
their politics to overwhelmingly urban settings in the Armenian
Diaspora and work mostly with a younger generation forcibly
`alienated' from agricultural land. Under these new conditions, issues
related to agrarian reform seemed remote and uninteresting to new
generation of ARF activists and supporters and, from then on, the
founding fathers of the independent republic of 1918-1920 were
evaluated primarily from a nationalist and irredentist perspective.
Their social agenda was mostly ignored, perhaps unconsciously. This
paper will constitute a humble attempt to remind the academic and lay
public of an understudied aspect of the social and ideological
dimensions of the history of the ARF.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Khatchik Derghougassian
Khatchik DerGhoukassian received his PhD in International Studies from
the University of Miami, Florida, and a MA in International Relations
from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in
Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently he teaches international politics
and security at the Universidad de San Andrés and the Universidad de
San Andrés -FLACSO-Universidad de Barcelona joint M.A. program in
International Relations and Negotiations. He is also a Visiting
Adjunct Professor at the American University of Armenia. Before
starting an academic career, he worked as a journalist for Aztag daily
newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon (1982-1987) and as the editor of Armenia
the Armenian newspaper in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1987-1997).
The Dialectical Dynamics of Socialism and National Liberation: The
Historical Evolution of ARF Ideology
The aim of the paper is to analyze the evolution of the
ARF-Dashnaktsutiun ideology since the foundation of the party to the
present from a systemic approach. The main argument sustains that the
official ideology of the ARF has always been socialism in its
reformist/non-Marxist version known as social-democracy. Yet the
evolution of socialism on the ARF's political agenda is closely linked
to the national liberation struggle in its successive historical
phases; hence in its practical aspect the ARF ideology should be
understood in the dialectical dynamics of the socialist universalism
and the practical decisions of a national political agenda in their
interaction with systemic conditions. The paper, therefore, proposes a
novel approach to the ARF ideology, which, so far, has been portrayed
as a pragmatic balance of socialism and nationalism. This new approach
combining political philosophy and international analysis allows not
only critically studying the past but also foreseeing the current
challenges the party's ideology faces.
From: A. Papazian
Friday, November 19th, 2010
by Asbarez
This year marks the 120th anniversary of the founding of Armenian
Revolutionary Federation-one of the oldest and most influential
political organizations in Armenian history. On this occasion, the USC
Institute of Armenian Studies and the Armenian Review have organized a
commemorative academic conference on the ARF's history, current
activities and future prospects.
The conference titled `The ARF at 120: History in the Making' will be
held on December 4 at the Davidson Conference Center on the campus of
University of Southern California (Driving Directions). The conference
will critically examine such key issues as socioeconomic aspects of
ARF's activities in Armenia; role of women in the ARF; the challenge
of functioning as state-based political party and a Diaspora-wide
political movement; and assessments of historical developments and
issues of current relevance.
The day-long event will feature academics, researchers, professionals
and activists from Armenia, the Middle East, Europe and the United
States, who will present nuanced and multi-disciplinary analyses of
ARF's activities in celebration of its 120th anniversary.
The conference will be webcasted live on the day of the event on
arf120.com. The event is free and open to the public but the
organizers are strongly recommending attendees register ahead of time.
Register online at arf120.com.
Today, we introduce the speakers and present some of the topics to be
addressed during the first panel of the conference, titled `ARF in
History and Ideology.'
Richard Hovannisian (Moderator)
Prof. Hovannisian was born and raised in Tulare, California. He
received his BA (1954) and MA (1958) degrees from the University of
California, Berkeley, and his PhD (1966) from University of
California, Los Angeles. He was an Associate Professor of History at
Mount St. Mary's College, Los Angeles, from 1966 to 1969. In 1987,
Professor Hovannisian was appointed as the first holder of the
Armenian Educational Foundation Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian
History at the UCLA. Hovanissian is a Guggenheim Fellow who has
received numerous honors for his scholarship, civic activities, and
advancement of Armenian Studies. His biographical entries are included
in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World among other
scholarly and literary reference works.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Houri Berberian
Houri Berberian is Professor of Middle Eastern History at California
State University, Long Beach, where she also serves as Director of the
Middle Eastern Studies Program. She is the author of a number of
articles and a book, Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional
Revolution of 1905-1911: `The Love for Freedom Has No Fatherland'
(2001).
Connected Revolutions: The ARF and Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian
Revolutions in the Early Twentieth Century
Using the concept of `connected histories,' this paper explores the
Ottoman, Iranian, and Russian Revolutions of the early twentieth
century through the circulation, interaction, and relationships of
Armenian revolutionary elites, particularly Dashnaks, who
simultaneously operated in each of these political and social
upheavals. This study is interested in the connectedness of all three
revolutions, which have helped shape the history of the states and
societies in which they occurred. One of the most interesting and
significant aspects about the three revolutions occurring
approximately at the same time in regions bordering each other is the
circulation and flow of revolutionary elites, activists, and
intellectuals as well as revolutionary literature and arms throughout
the three regions before and during the revolutions. In the case of
the Dashnaks, they traveled from one Armenian community to another in
the Ottoman, Russian, and Qajar empires, taking advantage of a network
of already established political party branches or communities of
like-minded activists. Dashnaks played an interesting and at times
important role in the events leading to revolutions in the Russian,
Ottoman, and Iranian empires and in the course of the revolutions
themselves.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elke Hartmann
Elke Hartmann, has studied History and Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies
in Berlin specializing on Modern Ottoman history. Her MA thesis
examines the German military mission to the Ottoman Empire during the
reign of Abdulhamid II, while her dissertation analyzes conscription
in the late Ottoman Empire in the context of modern state and nation
building. The topic of her current research within the research group
`Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective' at Free University in
Berlin are the memoirs of Armenian fedayis, focusing mainly on Roupen
Der Minasian's `Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary.'
`The Turks and Kurds are our fate`: ARF Concepts and Strategies of Self-Defense
Roupen Der Minasian, fedayi, minister in the first Armenian republic
and member of the ARF Bureau, was undoubtedly one of the important
figures in the ARF in the first decades of the 20th century that were
so crucial in Armenian history. But Roupen's prominent status among
contemporary ARF leaders is the result especially of his writings. His
memoirs, printed in seven volumes and totaling more than 2,700 pages,
is the most voluminous single report about life in Western Armenia
before the Armenian Genocide and the fedayi movement in particular. In
this paper they will serve as a starting point for the analysis of ARF
concepts and strategies of self-defense in Ottoman Western Armenia.
The paper gives a short introduction to Roupen's `Memoirs of an
Armenian Revolutionary' as a first-person narrative, followed by a
summary of what this text tells us about Armenian self-defense. The
`Memoirs' reflect the differences within the party and between Eastern
(Russian) and Western (Ottoman) Armenian functionaries. They are
testimony of Roupen's own position of extreme pragmatism. They show
that the ARF self-defense agenda went beyond armed struggle, also
including political methods, notably the cooperation with the Young
Turkish movement. But, most importantly, Roupen's memoirs point out
the Ottoman context of the Armenian fedayi movement.
Accordingly, in its main part, this paper offers an analysis of the
ARF self-defense, placing it in the context of the Ottoman system of
administration and rule in its Eastern provinces and of the local and
regional power relations in the Eastern Ottoman borderlands. This
paper argues that the Armenian fedayis and the ARF were themselves
part of the highly complex tangle that characterized Ottoman rule in
the Western Armenian provinces, becoming one of the actors involved
locally in controlling the villages and their populations, Armenian
and non-Armenian alike.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ara Sanjian
Ara Sanjian is an Associate Professor of Armenian and Middle Eastern
History and the Director of the Armenian Research Center at the
University of Michigan-Dearborn. From 1986 to 1991, he studied for his
master's degree in history at Yerevan State University. From 1991 to
1994 he did his PhD in modern history of the Middle East at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London. From 1996
to 2005, he was the Chairman of the Department of Armenian Studies,
History and Political Science at Haigazian University in Beirut. His
research interests focus on the post-World War I history of Armenia,
Turkey, and the Arab states of Western Asia. He is the author of
Turkey and Her Arab Neighbors, 1953-1958: A Study in the Origins and
Failure of the Baghdad Pact (2001), as well as a monograph and a
number of scholarly articles. He is currently working on a book-length
project on the Armenian quest for Mountainous Karabagh under Soviet
rule in 1923-1987.
The ARF & Land Reform in Eastern Armenia, 1917-1920
The paper will discuss the ideological position taken and the policies
implemented by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) as regards
the introduction of land reform in Transcaucasia and Armenia in
particular from the February Revolution in Russia in 1917 to the
sovietization of Armenia in late 1920. It thus covers the successive
interim, Transcaucasian regional administrations - the Ozakom, the
Commissariat, and the Seim - followed by the periods of the
independent Transcaucasian Federation (1918) and the independent
Republic of Armenia (1918-1920).
The paper is based on research conducted in the documents of the
legislature, the Council of Ministers and the Ministry of Agriculture
and State Properties of the Republic of Armenia (1918-1920), all
housed at present in the National Archives of Armenia in Yerevan, plus
on an extensive use of Armenian language newspapers and periodicals
published between 1917 and 1920 in Yerevan, Etchmiadzin, Kars, Shushi,
Baku, Tiflis and Akhaltsikhe.
The paper will argue that the ARF considered itself as the carrier of
the ideals and social and political objectives of the February
Revolution of 1917, even after the proclamation of Armenia's
independence the following year. As the ruling political party, it
remained committed to the eventual socialization of land in Armenia,
although successive internal and external political crises permitted
only the adoption and implementation of some interim measures toward
that end.
With the collapse of the independent Armenian state, the leaders of
the ARF were forced into exile, where they were obliged to adjust
their politics to overwhelmingly urban settings in the Armenian
Diaspora and work mostly with a younger generation forcibly
`alienated' from agricultural land. Under these new conditions, issues
related to agrarian reform seemed remote and uninteresting to new
generation of ARF activists and supporters and, from then on, the
founding fathers of the independent republic of 1918-1920 were
evaluated primarily from a nationalist and irredentist perspective.
Their social agenda was mostly ignored, perhaps unconsciously. This
paper will constitute a humble attempt to remind the academic and lay
public of an understudied aspect of the social and ideological
dimensions of the history of the ARF.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Khatchik Derghougassian
Khatchik DerGhoukassian received his PhD in International Studies from
the University of Miami, Florida, and a MA in International Relations
from the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in
Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently he teaches international politics
and security at the Universidad de San Andrés and the Universidad de
San Andrés -FLACSO-Universidad de Barcelona joint M.A. program in
International Relations and Negotiations. He is also a Visiting
Adjunct Professor at the American University of Armenia. Before
starting an academic career, he worked as a journalist for Aztag daily
newspaper in Beirut, Lebanon (1982-1987) and as the editor of Armenia
the Armenian newspaper in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1987-1997).
The Dialectical Dynamics of Socialism and National Liberation: The
Historical Evolution of ARF Ideology
The aim of the paper is to analyze the evolution of the
ARF-Dashnaktsutiun ideology since the foundation of the party to the
present from a systemic approach. The main argument sustains that the
official ideology of the ARF has always been socialism in its
reformist/non-Marxist version known as social-democracy. Yet the
evolution of socialism on the ARF's political agenda is closely linked
to the national liberation struggle in its successive historical
phases; hence in its practical aspect the ARF ideology should be
understood in the dialectical dynamics of the socialist universalism
and the practical decisions of a national political agenda in their
interaction with systemic conditions. The paper, therefore, proposes a
novel approach to the ARF ideology, which, so far, has been portrayed
as a pragmatic balance of socialism and nationalism. This new approach
combining political philosophy and international analysis allows not
only critically studying the past but also foreseeing the current
challenges the party's ideology faces.
From: A. Papazian