Collective Trauma and the Armenian Genocide: Armenian, Turkish and Azerbaijani Relations Since 1839

Why have Armenian-Turkish-Azerbaijani relations failed to improve in recent years? What has been proposed for peace and relationship stabilization and development? In an analysis applicable beyond the South Caucasus, Dr. Steiner will summarize the current conflict and its background. This includes naming the traumatic events, past and present, which all these people experienced relevant to their relationships with each other. Others’ proposals for peace and relationship improvement will then be listed. To them, Dr. Steiner will add hers: working with the effects of collective psychological trauma, past, intergenerational, and present.   

For more than two decades, Dr. Steiner, Senior Fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human rights at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health, while practicing depth psychotherapy with traumatized individuals, has co-facilitated conflict resolution workshops, mostly between Israelis and Palestinians and between Armenians and Turks. She observed the failure of conflict resolution processes, asked why, and offered some likely answers in her book, Collective Trauma and the Armenian Genocide: Armenian, Turkish and Azerbaijani Relations Since 1839. Her talk will propose specific ways to actualize her proposals. Her understanding and recommendations are presented in two non-psychological contexts -- accountability through international law and power politics -- within which international conflict resolution must be forged.