The participants in the exchange are Ronald Grigor Suny, Engin Deniz Akarli, Selim Deringil, and Vahakn N. Dadrian. In terms of substance as well as the identity of the participants, the debate is clearly a breakthrough.

Historian Bernard Lewis has characterized the events of 1915 as "a desperate struggle between two nations for the possession of a single homeland." Suny first dismisses this notion and any notion of a civil war: In speaking of a civil war, he notes, "professional falsifiers" portray the victims of genocide "as one side in a fairly even struggle"; they elevate the perpetrators to heroic defenders of their homeland.

Moreover, the ruling Young Turks did not clearly view themselves as leaders of a Turkish nation whose "homeland" was the Armenian plateau. They saw themselves more as leaders of an embattled empire. They dreamed of expanding the empire into the Caucasus and possibly Central Asia. Suny argues that the Young Turks organized the Genocide in "a final, desperate effort to revive and expand the empire."

Suny maintains that the massacres of the 1890s under Sultan Abdülhamid and the events of 1915 were fundamentally different in intent. For the sultan, repression was the "preferred strategy for maintaining the decaying imperial arrangement." Massacres were a form of repression. The intent of the Young Turks, however, was not repression but a revolutionary transformation of the empire.

Suny argues that genocide was not a natural, inevitable extension of long-simmering Turkish racial or religious hatred of Armenians. Genocide required "a major strategic decision by elites in power." According to Suny, this decision was made "in the brutalizing context" of World War I: having suffered humiliating defeats in the first year of the war, the Young Turks convinced themselves of "an imminent Armenian danger." They then "decided to carry out a vicious policy of deportation and massacre to clear the region of Armenians."

Writing at the request of the editors of Armenian Forum, three scholars respond to Suny. The first response is by Engin Deniz Akarli. Akarli holds an endowed chair at Brown University. He is well known as an authority on Sultan Abdülhamid and on Ottoman Lebanon.

Akarli agrees with Suny that the sultan’s "relatively measured repression of the Armenians" was different from the Young Turks’ "annihilative policies toward them."

He disagrees with Suny, however, on the matter of Pan-Turkism. According to Akarli, the Young Turks’ primary concern was the preservation of the Ottoman state as a centralized structure "at whatever cost."

Akarli also points out that many of the Young Turk leaders came from the Balkans, where they had witnessed atrocities carried out by Christians. The humiliating defeat of 1912–13 in the Balkans was very much on their minds in 1914-15.

The second response to Suny is by Selim Deringil. A professor of history at Bogazici University in Istabul, Deringil is known for his work on Turkey during World War II.

Deringil is highly critical of Suny’s article. He also disagrees with Suny on the matter of Pan-Turkism: "Suny seems to have bought into the Russian paranoia of the Pan-Turanian bogey, which always remained a fringe movement in Young Turk politics. Their primary goals always remained reconquest of lost Balkan territory and Egypt."

Deringil agrees with Suny that the "civil war" thesis is "nonsense," especially in connection with places far removed from the war zone: "There is also no doubt that no historian with a conscience can possibly accept the ‘civil war’ line, which is a travesty of history."

The third response to Suny is by Vahakn N. Dadrian. Dadrian is the author of numerous studies on the Armenian Genocide. In his 50-page response to Suny, Dadrian puts forth some of his most forceful arguments about the factors leading to the Genocide.

Dadrian disagrees with Suny’s position that the massacres of the 1890s and the events of 1915 were different in intent. "Sultan Abdülhamid’s restraint in the matter of selecting the target population and the duration of the organized mass murder appear as signs of exigency and expediency rather than of moderation and mercifulness."

Dadrian argues that the massacres of the 1890s were connected with the events of 1915 in important ways. They opened the way for 1915 by providing the Young Turks with "a predictable impunity." The absence of adverse consequences for the sultan in the 1890s allowed the Young Turks to move forward without fear.

Dadrian adduces evidence that the Young Turks had long intended to eradicate Armenians. He holds that the decision to commit genocide was not a spontaneous decision during the world war; the genocide was not "a crime of passion."

In his reply, Suny addresses the criticism that he exaggerates the significance of Pan-Turkism. Suny maintains that his critics provide little reason to accept their "weighing of some influences over others."

The exchange brings matters of interpretation into sharp focus. The matter of "continuity" versus "contingency" emerges as a central analytical issue.

The exchange is accompanied by a selection of photographs of Armenian families in the Ottoman Empire. The photographs, from the Project SAVE Armenian Photograph Archives in Watertown, Massachusetts, bring home the human dimensions of the Catastrophe.