The Armenian Genocide, which occurred during the course of World War I, took place at atime when the term “genocide” had not yet been coined in global politics. Previous researchhas shown that awareness of the events against the Armenians was high among the variousnations in Europe and beyond.

Through multi-country reporting, the atrocities and persecutions were described indetail to the outside world, creating a strong criticism of Turkey and the ruling Young Turkswho were already considered at the time to be the leading factor in the mass killings. Thepurpose of this paper is therefore to examine how the Swedish reporting of the ArmenianGenocide was during the time of the events before the concept of genocide was coined inglobal politics.

The questions asked are therefore what keywords were used to describe the genocidebefore the concept and whether these keywords can be linked to the concept of genocide. In order to answer these questions, the material used in this thesis is reports from Constantinopleand Sofia sent to the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1914 and 1919 and theSwedish newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet between 1915 and 1917.

As a theory and method, Max Weber's ideal type is used to define the concept of“genocide” as an ideal where the key words are used to achieve the various criteria that thegenocide ideal consists of. Text analysis is also used as a method to find and define thevarious keywords used in Swedish reporting.

The results show that the keywords used in contemporary reporting fulfill thegenocide ideal and can be directly linked to the concept coined after World War II. In thisway, the contemporary reporting shows that the Armenian Genocide fulfills the criteriarequired to be classified as genocide even before the concept existed. This is important tohighlight in order to stop the denial of the genocide but also to spread knowledge for futureevents that may be classified as genocide.