The Gendered Necropolitics of Armenian–Ottoman Conscripts

Scholarly and testimonial evidence from Armenian, English, French, German, and Turkish sources document the gendered ways by which the Ottoman Empire utilized mandatory military service — conscription — as a tool to carry out genocide during the First World War. Recruitment and deployment policies empowered Ottoman conscripts to commit crimes while simultaneously authorizing the capture and destruction of Armenian men and boys. Given the obfuscations that arose amid the war’s normalized carnage, it is crucial to note that the intent to destroy and the method of capture that Ottoman perpetrators used existed prior to the demise of their targets. Due to the empire’s gendered necropolitical exploitation of Armenians, combined with the precedent of the draft as a way to raise armed forces, assemble forced labourers, and punish men deemed insubordinate to imperial leaders, the era’s mass loss of life continues to offer some observers a way to erroneously excuse and deny this case of genocide.