Coming to Terms with Dark Pasts?

This chapter introduces the book’s core questions, summarizes the stakes of inquiry, introduces the two narratives analyzed in the book, outlines the central argument, and situates this study in relation to existing scholarship on memory, transitional justice, and international norms. Given the challenges of reckoning with the past, what are the sources of continuity in states’ narratives of dark pasts, and when and why do states choose to change such narratives? To answer these questions, this book analyzes the trajectories over the past sixty years of Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the Nanjing Massacre and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Extrapolating from this analysis, the book argues that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, while domestic considerations determine the content of such change.