My dissertation examines the logic and ramifications of what I call “erasure,” the process of removing traces of a group marked as different from the core group dominating the state, from the state’s territory. In addition to physical destruction, erasure encompasses the removal of ideational traces of a people; their language, customs, representation in maps, censuses, identification documents, textbooks, touristic guides, etc. Erasure triggers a more deeply existential fear than physical harm, the fear of being erased—as a people—from history. 

I first show that unifying these phenomena, that are often studied separately, reveals underlying common patterns that go beyond state or local level causes. I demonstrate how the consolidation of the modern international system creates pressures and incentives for states to erase their "internal others," starting in the 19th century. Second, I theorize three ideal-types of the ramifications of erasure that spread its use within the international system. Processes of “structuring ignorance,” in which the nation’s artificialness and the presence of internal others are misremembered, produce irreconcilable identity narratives and heighten threat perceptions for the erasers and the erased, ultimately fostering more erasure (feedback loop). Erasure also changes the behavior (indirect reverberations) or the environment of action (interactive reverberations) of other actors, triggering new loops elsewhere at other times.

Through discourse analysis and process tracing of a range of nation-building materials, memoirs, intelligence reports, and diplomatic correspondences, collected in archives, I retrace through my primary case on the Ottoman Empire how the Armenian Genocide reverberates in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and in the Kurdish “issue” in Turkey, and across Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The extension cases of the United States, Cameroon, and Indonesia in turn, show variation in the reverberations of erasure and its mitigation across time and space.

The article version of the dissertation’s theory and main case won the 2025 OSU Francis R. Aumann Award for Best Paper Presented at a Conference and is currently under review.