Justin McCarthy

Who is Justin McCarthy?

Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. He holds an honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and is a board member of the Institute of Turkish Studies. His area of expertise is the history of the late Ottoman Empire.

McCarthy has attracted most attention for his revisionist views on the Armenian Genocide, occurring during the waning years of the Ottoman Empire. Most genocide scholars label these massacres as genocide, but McCarthy views them as part of a civil war, triggered by World War I, in which equally large numbers of Armenians and non-Armenians died. Because his work denies the genocidal nature of the Armenian Genocide, he has often faced harsh criticism by other scholars who have characterized his views as genocide denial. He has been described as a scholar on the Turkish side of the debate.