In August 1988, Akçam began work as a research scientist at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research following an invitation from Iranian scholar Hadi Ressesade. Ressesade, who was studying torture in Iran, proposed that Akçam could do a study on torture in Turkey. Akçam decided to study Armenians after meeting a German librarian of Lebanese-Armenian origin, who urged him to do so. In 1991, he organized a workshop on the Ottoman Military Tribunal that judged the crimes of the Armenian genocide. He later recalled, "As I progressed in my readings of Abdul Hamid’s massacres, I thought to myself: I know the history of the French Revolution, of Russia in 1917, of Chinese Communism, but I do not know Turkish history." Akçam was initially reluctant to use the word "genocide" for anti-Armenian violence, because "by qualifying it a genocide you become a member of a collective associated to a crime, not any crime but to the ultimate crime". He received his PhD from Leibniz University Hannover with a dissertation titled, "Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide: On the Background of the Military Tribunals in Istanbul between 1919 and 1922".