The Lessons of Late Ottoman Genocides for Contemporary Iraq and Syria

Hannibal Travis is Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law. He is the author of the first comprehensive legal history of genocide in the Middle East and North Africa, entitled Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan (Carolina Academic Press, 2010). He has also contributed the chapters on the Assyrian genocide to four anthologies: Forgotten Genocides, Hidden Genocides, The Great Catastrophe, and Genocide in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic. He has published many articles on freedom of expression, human rights in a variety of contexts, and telecommunications policy. His second book, entitled Genocide, Ethnonationalism, and the United Nations: Exploring the Causes of Mass Killing Since 1945 (Routledge, 2012), used the archives of the United Nations and decades of empirical research to attempt the first in-depth exploration of the causes of genocide and politicide based on primary-source materials and comparative mortality statistics.