For the past two decades, the Turkish academic Ayse Gul Altinay has been providing, through her writing and research, incisive analysis of the impact of violence on her country. Her work offered a better understanding of how conflict has passed through generations and was beginning to build a blueprint on how to break this cycle.

But last May, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sentenced Ms. Altinay, a professor of anthropology and director of Sabanci University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence, to 25 months in prison. Her crime ? Aiding a terrorist organization by signing a 2016 petition supporting a peaceful resolution to a three-decades-long conflict with a Kurdish militant group. Of the petition’s more than 2,000 signatories, nearly 700 were put on trial and over 450 were removed from their posts by government decree or direct action from their own university.

These “Academics for Peace” are only a fraction of the thousands of academics being silenced under the Turkish government’s purge of academic institutions. The crackdown, which followed the failed coup against Mr. Erdogan in 2016, has created a vacuum at a pivotal moment, just as the country was beginning to openly confront some of its painful past. The work of academics has been critical to the process, piecing together more complete histories to promote understanding and basic human rights. The ongoing repression will cost future generations knowledge that is vital not only to overcoming past trauma, but also to easing the perpetuation of conflict.

Two of the most polarizing issues in Turkey’s history have been the campaign of deportation and mass killings of the Armenians by the Ottomans during World War I, and the decades-long oppression of the country’s Kurdish citizens. As Ms. Altinay wrote in a 2013 article, after the emergence of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the new nation experienced a national “forgetting” in regard to the estimated 1.5 million Armenians who were killed and the uncountable number of Armenian women and children survivors who were Islamized to assimilate in the lead-up to the creation of the state. For nearly a century, what is now known as the Armenian genocide was largely deemed a threat to the state’s Turkishness and remained a risky topic in Turkey.