Dr. Yücel Güçlü, a career diplomat in the Turkish Foreign Ministry, has written a study of what he calls “the Armenian events” in Cilicia between 1914 and 1923. The author makes it clear in the introduction to the book that his intent is to challenge the idea that the Armenians were subjected to genocide during and after World War I. To achieve this goal he frames the issue in terms of “Armenian revolutionary and separatist movements,” countered by “the Turkish measures of self-defense,” but complicated by “Allied schemes” (p. 2).

In his review of my book Violent Modernity: France in Algeria (IJMES 44 [2012]: 199–201), Paul Silverstein concludes that my argument “in essence boils down to a central syllogism: modernity equals colonialism equals violence.” While I appreciate the time and the effort he put into reading and presenting my book to readers of IJMES, I need to say that this is simply not my argument. Using insights from anthropologist Marshal Sahlins, I examine colonial culture (generative of postcolonial events) and show how it has continued to shape the present and how it manifests itself mainly in the culture of nationalism, any allusion of which is totally absent from Silverstein's review. I define violence in a variety of ways—physical, symbolic, and textual—which all point to the power to transform, that is, to displace, to destroy, and ultimately to create. If a reader misses this idea, the entire argument will be overlooked. I made a complex argument taking into consideration time (i.e., change) and different agencies (i.e., a complex set of historical actors, not reducible to one single binary opposition).

I regret that Professor Hannoum believes I mischaracterized his argument. By their nature, book reviews synthesize and condense; they cannot capture all the nuances authors may have wished to convey in their larger work. For all of our shared interests and engagements, Professor Hannoum and I clearly disagree on the contours of the academic historiography of colonial Algeria, on the lasting influence of colonialism as a (violent) project of world-making, on the interplay of empirical description and theoretical reflection, and on the role of anthropological research in articulating a political critique of the present. Professor Hannoum's book was written as a polemic and thus invites argument. I encourage readers to examine his book and respond themselves.

It was with great expectation that I awaited IJMES' review of my book on the Iraqi communist movement, Red Star over Iraq: Iraqi Communism before Saddam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), published in the November 2012 issue. However, any hope of a balanced assessment of my work—the result of many years of painstaking research—disappeared as soon as I began reading Professor Tareq Ismael's review. Ismael, who is the author of the only other work on the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) that has been published in English in recent times, might seem like an appropriate scholar to offer a specialist view on the topic. But this proved not to be the case.

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the author's reply to my review of Red Star over Iraq. In scholarship, the devil is in the details, and so, as Johan Franzén suggests, when evaluating a scholarly endeavor, I do indeed consider “it worthwhile to devote . . . [my] whole review to details.” If the facts are inaccurate, it follows that the conclusions are flawed. Beyond this, my only other comment is that I find the tone and tenor of Franzén's reply to be cast in personal terms and as such unprofessional.