Abstract
This paper will examine the utilization of violent methods by Armenian revolutionaries in Sasoun in the closing decade of the nineteenth century. It will focus on the organization of armed peasant bands, the establishment of limited control by revolutionaries over particular areas, and the prevalent features of the clashes between the Fourth Army and the Hamidiye regiments on the one side, and fedayi bands on the other. Armed struggle and counterinsurgency around Sasoun and its surroundings will form its backbone because of the sheer amount of documentation on revolutionary activity in the region, and its significance in both the renegotiation of the Armenian Question between the Great Powers and the Hamidian regime in the mid 1890s, and the Armenian nationalist imagination as the paragon of militant struggle against the state. Sasoun was among the first regions in the countryside of Ottoman Armenia to offer resistance to the encroachments of Kurdish tribesmen and the Fourth Army, and revolutionaries and peasants there continued to resist the state’s attempts to establish a permanent presence in the form of military barracks between the two periods of major armed insurgency in 1894 and 1904. In doing so, it seeks to treat the popularization of revolutionary violence within the context of the development and appropriation of alternative methods of opposition to the Hamidian regime.
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