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Alice von Bieberstein, "Temptations in Ruin: Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
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- [01:08]
Alice von Bieberstein
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- [02:12]
Armand Gildes
Hi everyone. My name is Armand Gildes and this is the New Books Network. Today I have the great pleasure of hosting Alice von Bieberstein to talk about her new book, Temptations in Ruin, Sovereign Accumulation and the Making of Post Genocide Turkey that came out of University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025. Welcome to the New Books Network, Alice.
- [02:34]
Alice von Bieberstein
Thank you. Thank you so much Armand for having me. It's very kind.
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Armand Gildes
Before we dive into your book, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
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Alice von Bieberstein
Sure, yeah. I'm currently guest professor in German, we call it Vertungsprofessur at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humb University, Berlin. And yeah, I guess on paper I kind of have whatever might appear as a career of sorts. I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge with the wonderful Yay Navarro and continued there with a postdoctoral project as part of an erc, funded a larger grant called Living with Remnants, which is also the context in which the research was done. That led to the publication of this book. And following that, I had a research fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg, the Center for Advanced Studies in Berlin, and afterwards landed this postdoctoral position at Humboldt University, which later transformed into a guest professorship. So everything kind of looks well on paper, but yeah, the position kind of ends at the end of this year. So, yeah, even though I've come quite some way, I think there is still this kind of structural precarity that is in many ways inescapable, even if you've been in this system, at least in Germany, for so many years. I'm also a single mom. I'm also a disabled scholar. So we have this kind of weird combination, which I think we have a lot in our careers, sort of between, on the one hand, some kinds of successes, but on the other hand, these kind of structural precarity dimensions that have these multiple forms and shapes that they take.
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Armand Gildes
I mean, I really appreciate you bringing up all this in response to this question, because these are usually stories we don't tend to hear in academic context. So I really appreciate it. How did this book come about? What is its story? How did you begin to work on this topic?
- [04:55]
Alice von Bieberstein
So, yeah, it's a little bit, maybe not the kind, again, not maybe the way these stories are being generally told. I'm not sure, but. So it was towards the end of my PhD, I was finalizing my PhD, writing the ends, the final bits of my PhD, when my then supervisor, Yael Navarro, approached me because she was working on this ERC grant proposal and she wanted to do a larger project on the afterlife of violence in Turkey. And given my previous PhD research, which had been about the politics of history and memory and citizenship, focusing on the Amin community, and kind of questions politics of history and reckoning or denying these histories of violence, both in Berlin, Germany and then in Istanbul, Turkey, she thought I was a good candidate to also be part of this ERC project. The ERC project began three months before I submitted my PhD. So I actually had zero time to really come up with something new. I mean, come up with something new after having processed my PhD. So it was really not that I had a larger plan or a coherent, larger project framework proposal in mind. A lot of it was happenstance and really pure coincidence in the sense of me having a chat with a friend, telling him, look, for this ERC grant proposal, I need to come up with some kind of place where I could potentially do this research. And he was like, why don't you go to mush? And then I kind of. Of, yeah, like this ended up in mush. And things unfolded from there on. So it was really, I feel a little bit like I was thrown. And of course, from a kind of, you know, thinking through the politics and the ethics of all of this, I mean, in retrospect, I think this was really not sufficient in many ways, but it was just kind of the way that I was thrown into this project and I was thrown in many ways into the field site. Of course, with the background of the PhD that informed then everything in some ways. And my questions, my interests, you know, what. Yeah. What caught my attention, how conversations unfolded and how I then kind of. Yeah. Conducted this research over. Over the years to come.
- [07:33]
Armand Gildes
And maybe for us to understand a little bit better, you can mention your PhD project a little.
- [07:41]
Alice von Bieberstein
Yes.
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Armand Gildes
So we understand the continuity.
- [07:43]
Alice von Bieberstein
Yes, of course, of course. So the beginning of this PhD for me was really an interest. But now, you know, many, many, many, many years later, I think has become a more established concern or topic of discussion. But back then. So we're speaking, you know, 2007, 2006, 2007. For me, a big question was. Or the starting point of this, Jo, how is the Armenian genocide not so much remembered, but what place does it have? And what place does the Armenian community in Germany have at this intersection between a kind of German politics of history that is what we call, which I'm sure many people are familiar with this term, this reckoning with the past and the guest worker migration history. Because Armenians in many ways fall into this kind of blind spot in the sense that they are descendants of genocide. But they are also. Many of them also came as guest workers from Turkey, having gone through a process of Turkification, in the sense that they have Turkish citizens. Many have, especially those that came from eastern Turkey as descendants of survivors, came with Turkish names, with speaking Turkish, all of these things. So they were interpolated, addressed by the German state as Turkish. So I was really interested in this Kind of how they've experienced and navigated this tense field between recognition of genocidal history and this kind of institutional and everyday racism. And then I moved to Istanbul. And so the second half of the PhD project was then about understanding, so to speak, the equivalent, without that being the equivalent, of course, in Turkey through politics of denial and again, questions of minority governance and racism and these kind of historical experiences of citizenship and subjectivation in the context of Turkey, which is connected but also very different. And then from then on, so to speak, through this ERC project, I then had the chance to conduct research in Mush, which is a small provincial town in the kind of middle of what is now called Eastern Anatolia, but which has this very complicated history of territorialization and is also part of Western Armenia, in many sense historical Western Armenia, and of course, also Northern Kurdistan. So just to kind of give a better sense of the journey, and I
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Armand Gildes
mean, I want to first ask you about your concept, sovereign accumulation, but I feel like the question about Kalema hall and this, the significance of this neighborhood or the story you wanted to tell, maybe we can start from there. Like you're talking about this neighborhood within Mosh. Can we start from there?
- [10:53]
Alice von Bieberstein
Sure, sure. I think that makes sense. So when I arrived, again, having no clue what I was going to do, I basically bumped into, so to speak, an urban reconstruction project which is, yeah, in many sense banal and familiar and unfolds in many, many, many places of Turkey. And this case was, yes, it was an urban regeneration project that the municipality had decided that they were going to implement it in what is called Kalimahale Si. So the castle's quarter, which is the hist historical quarter of Mush. So up until the First World War, the foundation of the Republic, Mus was a kind of historical loop, small town. And afterwards. And so we have on the top of the hill, this kind of historical quarter. And then after the foundation of the Republic, we have all these kind of buildings that were then being built sort of sliding down the hill, so to speak. And of course, after 1923, as these new buildings emerged, this formerly historical quarter was in many ways abandoned for a more modern life underneath, but then became a kind of destination for villagers from the surrounding areas. And in the 90s, starting in the 90s in particular, from those that were being targeted as part of Turkey's counterinsurgency warfare against the Kurdish Liberation Movement. So it was when I arrived housing the poorest of the poor in this historical stock of buildings. In 2012, the city declared it the site of an urban regeneration project. And yes, and that kind of emerged in many ways as a focal point for this research. Not only because it is in many ways part of or was, how can we say, yeah, these historical buildings are one of the material remnants of historical Armenia? Because although I didn't conduct a kind of forensic study or a kind of detailed overlaying of the quarters, it is clear that some of these quarters that were targeted, I mean, some of the parts that were targeted were formerly also Armenian neighborhoods. So when Mush was part of the historical heartland of western Armenia until the Armenian genocide of 1915. So this kind of question of why that neighborhood was targeted for reconstruction when one could build these large and high rise, seven store social housing blocks also in other parts of the town, that was really a question that not only I raised, but that was really circulating in the town. Like why target the only part of the town that has this historical stock of buildings? And so this is really the first hinge of the book is this kind of refusal or hesitancy to respond to that question because people were in many ways not really clearly articulating their response, but kind of everybody was making this reference to that. It is tardy. It's a historical quota. And yeah, I already felt, okay. Interested and intrigued by what that reference then held in terms of thinking through this relation between destruction and the long after lives of the Armenian genocide.
- [14:54]
Armand Gildes
I mean, it's very striking. Also the story you're telling reminds me a lot about Diyarbakr and Sur Mahal, because I mean, this, I mean, building more modern buildings around and then this place becoming, you know, this deserted old neighborhood, then filling up with villages coming from around the Ibukar, but due to also like state violence in this part, it's a very. It's striking how similar it is. And I mean, one of the things that struck me while I was reading this is how also then the people questioning why the state was targeting Kole Mahalisi was that they were suspecting the state trying to find Armenian treasures for themselves. So can you tell us a bit about this stories around the treasure hunts?
- [15:54]
Alice von Bieberstein
Absolutely. So when I arrived to do fieldwork and people kind of assumed or understood or made some kind of link between me and an interest in the Armenian past of the region. I mean, something then deserves a whole discussion in and of itself. I realized that the term sort of Armeni, you know, Armenian in Turkish, really circulates in relation to two material objects and one is bodies. So in the sense that survivors, mostly very young children and young women who survived by being taken up and adopted or abducted and then forcefully adopted into families that the descendants of some of these survivors are still referred to as eremini. And the other way that it circulates is in relation to what in Turkish is called diffini, so treasures or Alton Gold. And. And this was something I did not know about. And of course as an anthropologist, I was like, whoa, what? And realizing, yes, so that something I studied in general. But it is also something that manifested in the context of this urban regeneration project in the sense that after the place was targeted and people then went on to kind of demolish their own houses and there was kind of, you know, they were trying to salvage the wooden beams and metal window frames, things that they could liquidate and make money off. And afterwards they really came in with diggers and shovels and heavy machinery and dug open the entire neighborhood to access, quote, unquote, the treasures and the gold that was assumed to be buried underneath. And it was also, as you say, and rightly kind of, remember from reading, it is also one of the ways that that the project in itself was made sense of or in some kind of, I guess, sort of subaltern kind of analysis of statecraft and kind of sovereign logics, that it was really that there is a widespread kind of mythological belief that Armenians, before being deported and killed, that they buried their valuable in the absence of banks, of course, as well, and the form that valuables and wealth had at that time, that it was buried somewhere because people believed that they would be able to return and retrieve these things. This is something that, as I said, goes beyond Kali Mahalesi. And it's also just a pleasurable pastime. But a lot of people are engaged in the context of widespread unemployment, despair, precarity, intentional de development of the region has to be read in the larger context of the region's political economy and the counterinsurgency warfare and all of these things. So this is part of a kind of larger phenomenon, but it also manifested precisely in the context of the demolition and in the way that the project as a whole was made sense of. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors and learn about our Associate degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington. Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit Carrington Edu Sci.
- [19:49]
Armand Gildes
And now this brings me to the main question I wanted to ask. I mean, you're developing or you're also like employing this concept of sovereign accumulation in relation to what you've been seeing in Kale Mahalis and like in this long journey of history. Can you tell us more about this? What is sovereign accumulation?
- [20:09]
Alice von Bieberstein
Sure. So, yes, this is one of the hard labors that we academics have to go through. I come with come up with kind of concepts that help us name what we're trying to name. It's not always easy. I wish I could have come up maybe with even a better concept. But what I'm trying to say is the following. So what really struck me is that this particular scene around Kareem Harisi that I observed ethnographically manifested different modalities through which this Armenian past of the region as a history of destruction and as a history of wealth creation, wealth generation, valorization, manifested in that ethnographic scene. So through urban reconstruction, through treasure hunting, but also through forms of heritage making that are also part of that. Also, you know, are certain cases that I account in the book. And so what interested me was how really like I was trying to understand how in this press moment, in these kind of 20, in the 21st century, in that 21st century moment of war, machine attacks, whatever war making, warring against the Kurdish population, which is never only a military campaign, but as I said, also has economic dimensions. It involves this kind of intense precariatization. It involves, of course, also targeting Kalimahalesi as these poor displaced villages. So there's all this dimension that are regionally specific, have this kind of colonial dimension. But then there's also a kind of political, economic dimension of neoliberal extractivism, basically the kind of particular logics of accumulation that are predominant also in the 21st century in Turkey and that reach also and resonate beyond Kurdistan, beyond this particular place that is part of Western Armenia, so to speak, historical Western Armenia. So this is a very important context. I was trying to understand in some sense how, or trying to name and analytically grasp how within, how it is out of that moment of colonial warfare and neoliberal extractivism, particular histories of sovereign, foundational, genocidal violence in their logic, and I will get to this, it's not just as a type of violence, but but in their characteristics as a particular kind of historical event, how these remain objects of investment for these contemporary logics of accumulation. So how they are not just and I think this is really an important part that I have to Keep emphasizing, because it's not just a kind of question of continuity or legacy or kind of structural legacy. It's not just the narrative that a lot of Kurds kind of repeat, you know, that Armenians were the breakfast, Kurds were lunch of sort of state sovereign violence. It is not just, you know, first, yes, the state targeted Armenians, now it's targeting Kurds. And it's not just that people, you know, inhabit this kind of structural landscape. No, what I'm trying to sort of get at is that really from within that scene of impoverishment and precarization and marginalization and discrimination and repression and sovereign violence in a contemporary moment, a previous episode of sovereign violence is being kind of called upon, mobilized and actualized in the present. Why? Because. And this is kind of the historical analysis of this whole ethnography. Because the Armenian genocide was not only an event of mass murder, but it was also in the history of capitalism and the formation of Turkey's national economy in the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish nation state. A really pivotal mom that has been recognized by historians, you know, as an act of primitive accumulation because it entailed the mass transfer of wealth from non Muslims to a kind of then Muslim bourgeoisie that only in some sense emerged in many ways through this mass transfer of wealth. And I think this is really important. And also that's what I'm trying to do in the introduction by going really into the deep history of this. It was. Was at some level an act of primitive accumulation, but it was also, and related to that, really this kind of central node in the emergence of what I call the racialized property regime, and one that really henceforth structured access and entitlement to land and property along ethnic, religious lines in a way that positions these actors very differently in relation to property. And that is something that I pick up and I try in some sense illustrate might be the wrong word, but it structures the book in the sense that we have the state as an actor that engages in this urban reconstruction. And again, yes, as in 1915, recursively, so to speak, accumulates through destruction and through dispossessing the local population. Then we have. Have different sort of quote, unquote, you know, Kurdish actors, those that engage in the treasure hunting, which positions them more in a kind of act of benefiting and really aligning with this event as an event of master's possession in 1915. Then we have characters that have been. I mean, they have people in the book, Ercan in particular in the third chapter, who is socialized in the Kurdish movement and takes on a much more critical perspective. And then we have the descendants of Armenian survivors. And in the last epilogue, we have then the diaspora Armenians who return. And I'm really trying to, in some sense, tease out how all of these are positions within this racialized property regime, and then how we can make sense of this, their position in relation to 1915 as this pivotal moment when this kind of property regime emerged, and that it continues to structure how people relate to this historical landscape, not just in the sort of sense of embodied memory or, like, how they feel or what they remember, but really how they engage with it in a political, economic sense that how they would target it for value creation, valorization, and extraction in the present in this kind of. And that's what I'm saying, in this kind of recursive way. So that's why sovereign accumulation for me was a way to sort of capture the relation between contemporary modalities of contemporary economic logics in relation to an event of sovereign violence. It helped me understand that Turkey features a very distinct constellation between capitalism, genocidal violence, and the emergence of private property that is very distinct from a kind of European bourgeois nation state genealogy or other quote unquote or settler colonial context in which private popular racialization and genocidal violence of dispossession go hand in hand. And it allowed me to sort of name the sort of ethnographic thing that I was able to observe of how in that moment of desperation, in 100 years later, people reach to this history of violence in the hope that they can make money, in the hope that they can enrich themselves in an echo, but also in a confirmation and in a kind of bringing it back into the present of that historical moment in its kind of specificity. So I know this is super complex in some sense, I think, but. Yeah, I hope I was able to explain it a bit.
- [28:44]
Armand Gildes
No, definitely. And I mean, like, you really brought us to the title of the book, Temptations in Ruin, which I really like also.
- [28:55]
Alice von Bieberstein
It's funny. Can I just interject. It's really funny. A friend of mine told me about the title that when they first Googled it and found it on Amazon, that Temptations in Ruin brings the book together in the kind of. In proximity to kind of erotic. Great. It's like new readership for anthropology. Yeah,
- [29:17]
Armand Gildes
I mean, you already. I was. I. I mean, one of the things I really liked also was that this argument you're making, not so much against continuity, but, like, how recursiveness might be a more apt term to Talk about what you're talking about. And then, I mean, I'm. I'm very curious. What are you working on nowadays?
- [29:38]
Alice von Bieberstein
Yes, if I find time to work on anything. I think there are two things. One is a kind of leftover from the book. Indeed, as these projects always have these leftovers, as we know. And so what I was intrigued. The historical analysis is really focused on the kind of, as I said, on property, on political economy, on 1915 as an act of primitive accumulation that changed class relations, et cetera, et cetera. And when you go into this history of mass expropriation in 1915, there are two things that really struck me. One is that Armenians, while being deported and killed and. And be stolen. How can you say being, yes, dispossessed. They were in the administrative procedures that were put into place to facilitate this mass expropriation, they continue to be recognized even beyond their death as the rightful bearers of property titles over their former goods. And the way that worked was through these commissions for abandoned properties that set up accounts in the name of property owners. And of course, in many ways this was to suggest that compensation would be possible because officially, of course, those responsible did not announce that they would be killing 1.5 million people, but said they would just relocate and resettle these people in the Syrian desert and that people would be given the value of their goods and assets once they resettled in the Syrian deserts or beyond. But I still thought it was interesting. It's still something that in many ways strikes me that biopolitically, necropolitically, you kill the bodies, but you keep these Armenians, quote, unquote, not alive, but like, like intact, I don't know, as rights bearing subjects of the empire. So there is a kind of continuing embrace, so to speak, or relation between the genocidal state and those that are killed and dispossessed through the relation of property, but in a kind of custodian way, you know, where the state set itself up as a custodian over these values in the name of these killed Armenians, who were still recognized as rightful bearers of these property rights. So this is something that really struck me. And then the other thing is that the Ottoman Empire was very effective in appropriating all kinds of assets, including also bank accounts, so also movable, like liquid assets, except for some assets that were held by foreign companies and particular life insurances. And so this is something that really intrigues me as well, because then in the late 20th century, and I mean, an American lawyer in California initiated a long process at the end of which there were two class action lawsuits held in California in the early 2000s against New York Life and AXA as two life insurances that had given out life insurances to Armenians in the late 19th and early 20th century. One thing that I'm really more and more interested in is in understanding the place that the Armenian genocide holds in that transition between the Ottoman Empire and Turkish nation state, in terms of these financial and international relations of credit, debt, et cetera, and what these financial products and relations, what place they hold, how they played out, how they changed and what they might also enable in the aftermath of the genocide, as I said, in terms of these class action lawsuits, for instance, 100 years later. So that is something that I'm kind of interested in. And the other thing is that I was never much interested when I started this whole long journey in the German aspect. I mean, the German role, because Germany was an ally of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. They had generals and armies and all kinds of companies, et cetera, present in the Ottoman Empire. And I was never much interested in that part, but I am more and more interested actually in the long history and present of the security alliance and the sort of the security alliance between Germany and Turkey that we don't know enough about really. I think it's not been studied enough. And the security scape and these infrastructures and how it also complicates maybe also some assumptions we have about sort of north south relations, et cetera. Because in many ways Germany is a kind of helping hand for Turkey's own colonial war against the Kurdish population through the criminalization of the Kurdish liberation movement in Germany, where it's really Germany that acts as this kind of proxy for Turkey rather than the other way around. So this is complicated, but that's. I think what I'm interested in is sort of more thinking about these security infrastructures and security alliances between Turkey and Germany.
- [35:41]
Armand Gildes
I mean, both projects I would love to, to learn more about for sure. I think this is our time. Thank you so much, Elise, for joining us. It was a wonderful conversation.
- [35:52]
Alice von Bieberstein
Thank you, Armand. Thank you so much for reading, for engaging, for your thoughtful questions and for having me, for allowing me to share my work in this way. And thank you everyone for listening out there.
- [36:07]
Armand Gildes
Of course. So we talked about temptations and ruin, sovereign accumulation and the making of Post Genocide Turkey by Elise von Bieberstein, which came out of University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
- [36:21]
Alice von Bieberstein
Until next time, thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ewbooks network, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.