What a closed border does to memory

The border between Turkey and Armenia has been closed since 1993. It is usually discussed as a question of trade routes and diplomacy. It is also a question of memory.

Competitive victimhood thrives on distance. When Turks and Armenians meet only through television, textbooks and commemorative speeches, each community’s account of 1915 and its aftermath hardens into an identity. Our interviews with Turks and Armenians, read alongside opinion polls from both countries, show how deeply the claim to be the real victim has settled into national self-understanding. On that measure, Turkish–Armenian relations remain at the bottom of the reconciliation ladder.

Yet the same material contains a quieter finding. Where people have actually met, through academic exchanges, civil-society projects, business or family ties across the diaspora, the language changes. Interviewees who had spent time with the other side were readier to acknowledge suffering they had been taught to deny, even when they held on to their own community’s grief. Competitive victimhood loosened at the interpersonal level long before anything shifted politically.

This does not mean that contact alone reconciles. It means that the closed border does more than block goods: it protects each side’s narrative from the one thing that reliably complicates it, which is the other side’s face. Any serious attempt at normalisation will need to open that channel, and to expect that political recognition, if it comes, will follow personal recognition rather than lead it.