AGBU Webtalks

Sevan Nişanyan

Over the course of the eleven years during which they lived and worked in Istanbul, journalists Laure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier witnessed firsthand evidence of over a century of denialist politics and Kemalist rhetoric in Turkey. In this video they reflect on the imprisonment of the Turkish-Armenian intellectual, journalist and activist Sevan Nişanyan, who was arrested in 2014 and sentenced to over 16 years in prison on charges of carrying out illegal construction. A Turkish citizen by birth, Nişanyan is an ardent critic of the increasingly repressive government of Turkey, and his arrest is seen by many as a political act that carries wider implications for the state’s policies towards political dissenters and minorities.

Produced by AGBU WebTalks in partnership with the Zoryan Institute.

Guillaume Perrier is a French journalist and writer. He was a correspondent for Le Monde in Turkey from 2005 to 2014 and covered all major events in the region. Laure Marchand is a French journalist and writer. She was Le Figaro's correspondent in Istanbul from 2006 to 2014. Together they co-authored La Turquie et le Fantôme Arménien (Turkey and the Armenian Ghost) (Actes Sud), an award-winning book translated into Turkish (Iletisim, 2014) and English (McGill-Queen’s University Press) on the centennial of the Armenian Genocide in April 2015.

Topics: Biography/Memoir Current Affairs