Beyond A Divided Cyprus

Cyprus is a postcolonial island known for natural gas reserves and ethnic divisions. This volume presents a fresh perspective on the Cyprus problem by examining the societal transformations taking place within the island: socioeconomic development, population transitions and migration, and rapidly changing social and political institutions.

"[U]shers the reader into the complexities of the categorical ambiguity of Cyprus [and]... concentrates... on the Dead Zone of the divided society, in the cultural space where those who refuse to go to the poles gather." -- Anastasia Karakasidou, Wellesley College The volatile recent past of Cyprus has turned this island from the idyllic "island of Aphrodite" of tourist literature into a place renowned for hostile confrontations. Cyprus challenges familiar binary divisions, between Christianity and Islam, Greeks and Turks, Europe and the East, tradition and modernity. Anti-colonial struggles, the divisive effects of ethnic nationalism, war, invasion, territorial division, and population displacements are all facets of the notorious Cyprus Problem. Incorporating the most up-to-date social and cultural research on Cyprus, these essays examine nationalism and interethnic relations, Cyprus and the European Union, the impact of immigration, and the effects of tourism and international environmental movements, among other topics.

The island of Cyprus has been bitterly divided for more than four decades. One of the most divisive elements of the Cyprus conflict is the writing of its history, a history called on by both communities to justify and explain their own notions of justice. While for Greek Cypriots the history of Cyprus begins with ancient Greece, for the Turkish Cypriot community the history of the island begins with the Ottoman conquest of 1571. The singular narratives both sides often employ to tell the story of the island are, as this volume argues, a means of continuing the battle which has torn the island apart, and an obstacle to resolution. Cyprus and the Politics of Memory re-orientates history-writing on Cyprus from a tool of division to a form of dialogue, and explores a way forward for the future of conflict resolution in the region.

Unique volume of writings from both sides of the divide (Turkish/Cypriot) in Nicosia, the world's last divided capital

In today's world, the issue of Cyprus is notable for all the wrong reasons: because of the duration of the divisions in Cyprus itself between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots (formalized since 1983 by a disputed international border across the island); because of the involvement of Greece and Turkey, for which the "hyphenated" Cypriot communities form proxy battalions; and because of the failure of the United Nations' longstanding efforts to resolve the conflict. Much of the discussion in the book revolves around the difficulty of producing viable constitutional and civic arrangements in an.

On April 23, 2003, to the surprise of much of the world, the ceasefire line that divides Cyprus opened. The line had partitioned the island since 1974, and so international media heralded the opening of the checkpoints as a historic event that echoed the fall of the Berlin Wall. As in the moment of the Wall's collapse, cameras captured the rush of Cypriots across the border to visit homes unwillingly abandoned three decades earlier. It was a euphoric moment, and one that led to expectations of reunification. But within a year Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected at referendum a United Nations plan to reunite the island, despite their Turkish compatriots' support for the plan. In The Past in Pieces, anthropologist Rebecca Bryant explores why the momentous event of the opening has not led Cyprus any closer to reunification, and indeed in many ways has driven the two communities of the island further apart. This chronicle of the "new Cyprus" tells the story of the opening through the voices and lives of the people of one town that has experienced conflict. Over the course of two years, Bryant studied a formerly mixed town in northern Cyprus in order to understand both experiences of life together before conflict and the ways in which the dissolution of that shared life is remembered today. Tales of violation and loss return from the past to shape meanings of the opening in daily life, redefining the ways in which Cypriots describe their own senses of belonging and expectations of the political future. By examining the ways the past is rewritten in the present, Bryant shows how even a momentous opening may lead not to reconciliation but instead to the discovery of new borders that may, in fact, be the real ones.

In the space of a generation, Cyprus - the island of Aphrodite, goddess of beauty and love - has experienced an anti-colonial struggle, post-colonial chaos, internecine fighting and hatred, civil war, invasion, population displacements and physical partition. The narrative of Cyprus' recent history has created numerous attitudes and prejudices which run deep but which have never before been explored on a human level. Now for the first time Yiannis Papadakis, firmly planted in the Greek Cypriot world, sets out to discover 'The Other' - the much maligned Turks. Papadakis decided with some trepidation to travek to Constantinople (to his Greek worldview it was still Constantinople) to learn Turkish. There he discovered that actually it is Istanbul, and that Turkey is not the place of his once imagined demonology. Armed with new insights he returned to Cyprus and delved into the two communities, locked in their mutually contemptuous embrace, to explore their common humanity and to understand what has divided them. He focused on Nicosia where the people who used to live together in one neighbourhood found themselves separated by a 'Dead Zone', two armies and a UN force. His was a journey to the various sides of the Dead Zone and to the various zones of the dead, the realms of memory and history. This book is the moving, sometimes humorous and always fascinating account of that journey.

This text analyses the reasons for the continuing failure to re-unite the two states of Cyprus after over 40 years of division. It focuses on the Annan Plan - the popular name for the UN initiative to find a 'Comprehensive Solution to the Cyprus Problem' in anticipation of Cyprus' accession to the EU - & the reasons for its failure.