Migration, Minorities, and Refugeehood in Cyprus

This article uses displacement as an analytic lens for examining the Cypriot citizenship regime. It seeks to explain how the governance of migration, minorities, and the refugee existence stem from the politics of citizenship. The article first reviews the formation of migrant, minority, and refugee communities on the island and then discusses how minority groups have been governed since independence. It then reviews the displacements induced by the Cyprus conflict and similarly discusses the policies relating to the protection of refugees over the last two decades. From this basis, the article proceeds to analyse the governance of migrant, minority, and refugee groups within the citizenship regime from the perspectives of law and practice, concluding with policy suggestions

‘Struck by the Turks’: reflections on Armenian refugeehood in Cyprus

A large part of the Armenian community in Cyprus descends from survivors of the 1915 genocide in Anatolia who initially settled in neighbourhoods of the capital Nicosia. Following the independence of the island from British colonialists in 1960, these neighbourhoods fell under Turkish-Cypriot administration. As the ethnic conflict unfolded between Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots from 1963 onwards, these Armenians became displaced from their homes for a second time, seeking refuge in the Greek-Cypriot sector. Demetriou analyses the experience of this displacement and the entanglement of the legal, political and subjective spheres that constitute it. She examines the legal and administrative measures that classified those fleeing from Turkish-Cypriot administered areas as Tourkóplikti (struck by the Turks), a label that reinforced the distinction between Armenians and Greek-Cypriots, the majority of whom were displaced in 1974, and were officially classified as ‘refugees’ or prósfiyes. By looking at the difference between Tourkóplikti and prósfiyes, Demetriou interrogates the location of the Armenian minority within the Greek-Cypriot community. She argues that the silencing of minority experiences of the conflict does not merely impoverish our understanding of it, but also perpetuates a blindness to subtle structures of discrimination. Understanding these structures can show how victimization may turn into a domination strategy (such as through the production of a hegemonic rhetoric of refugeehood). Attention to such processes, which develop through and in the aftermath of conflict, might offer a better grasp of the complex patterns of post-conflict prejudice and exclusion

The Spirit of the Convention and the Letter of the Colony: Refugees Defining States in a British Overseas Territory

Whereas asylum policy is predicated on the assumption that states define refugees, this paper examines how refugees define states. Through the legal case of refugees stranded on a British military base in Cyprus since 1998, I show how refugees and the states that grant them or deny them protection become co-constitutive. The processes involved in judicial activism delineate the modalities through which sovereign governance and refugee agencies operate. I argue that modalities of sovereignty (colonialism, exceptionalism, and diplomacy) interact with modalities of agency (protest, vulnerability, and endurance) to redefine issues of refugee protection, state sovereignty, and externalization of migration management. The case shows the risks that denial of protection entails for states and not just refugees. Methodologically, I propose that a nuanced, ground-level understanding of the role of law in activism allows us a clearer view to these imbrications of sovereign governance and agency, and thus to the ambivalent and multivalent aspects of activism

Forms of activism on refugee protection in a British Overseas Territory: conventional, contentious, cultural

This paper begins from the premise that refugee protection is a field of contestation between practices that co-determine what is a proper refugee and what is a proper state. It locates this contestation in three forms of activism explored in turn: conventional, contentious, and cultural. It takes the example of refugees stranded on the British Bases in Cyprus as a micro-case of how these different forms of politics results in institutional and non-institutional practices that shape perceptions of the state. The paper analyses how these forms of activism evolved over a span of two decades, how they interacted with each other, and what their outcomes were. In this specific case, the contestation over protection responsibilities resulted in a court ruling that question the sovereign status of the British bases in Cyprus. Taking this as an instantiation of the risks that skirting responsibilities poses for states, the paper advances the claim that refugees can in fact define states as much as states define refugees. In a broader perspective, refugee protection is a measure of the extent to which states are democratic, just, or otherwise, actors in the international system

Counter-Conduct and the Everyday: Anthropological Engagements with Philosophy

This article critically examines counter-conduct as an analytical tool for understanding minority subjectivity. It revisits the concept within its Collège lecture context and alongside alternative descriptions of opposing governmental power. Its affinities with the anthropological notion of the “everyday” are explored in depth. The anthropological everyday, it is argued, points to nuances that enrich our understanding of the political. Heidegger's notions of “everyday” and “they” are discussed alongside ethnographic insights from Greece and Cyprus. This anthropological-philosophical encounter yields a more meaningful understanding of counter-conduct, as embedded in the everyday, that addresses both its broad scope and its analytic specificity

The political materialities of borders : new theoretical directions.

The political materialities of borders aims to bring questions of materiality to bear specifically on the study of borders. In doing this, the contributors have chosen an approach that does not presume the material aspect of borders but rather explores the ways in which any such materiality comes into being. Through ethnographic and philosophical explorations of the ontology of borders from the perspective of materiality, this volume seeks to throw light on the interaction between the materiality of state borders and the non-material aspects of state-making. This enables, it is shown, a new understanding of borders as productive of the politics of materiality, on which both the state project rests, including in its multifarious forms in the post-nation-state era

a feminist position on sharing governmental power and forging citizenship in Cyprus: proposals for the ongoing peace negotiations

On 12 August 2013, a feminist stood up at a podium and declared that she would work for the benefit of ‘everyone living in Cyprus, [irrespective] of language, religion, race, birthplace, class, age, physical ability, gender, or sexual orientation, to create an environment of fairness and equality, to replace the culture of conflict and violence with that of peace and reconciliation, while staying committed to the principles of democracy, social welfare, human rights and freedoms, and to establish a federal Cypriot state’. Her words were noted because the podium was a parliamentary one, albeit internationally shunned since it represents the unrecognised Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus, and because the context in which she uttered them was her swearing-in ceremony as a newly elected people’s representative. The session was stopped mid-oath, live broadcasts went silent, questions of ‘treason’ were raised, and she reappeared, reading the ‘normal’ oath. Doğuş Derya later stated that she had wanted to swear according to her conscience and principles first, before reading out the given script. In Cyprus, this was the first of such public reformulations of constitutional tenets (isn’t this what a legislature oath points to?). It remains to be seen how they might be followed up, especially in the current context of recently resumed peace negotiations

A peace of bricks and mortar: thinking ceasefire landscapes with Gramsci

This article addresses the ways in which Nicosia has been affected by division due to the ethno-political conflict and the gentrification efforts that have attended attempts to reunite the city. It examines two spaces of civic action in particular that have involved reconstruction and rehabilitation of two areas in the capital’s UN-controlled Buffer Zone: one by a peace and reconciliation initiative and another by the local variant of the global Occupy movement. In doing so, it addresses the question of how conflict politics becomes imbricated in the politics of urban development. The article examines the role of organic intellectuals in the making of war heritage and the transformation of post-conflict landscapes amid processes of gentrification. In the cases we are examining, we want to trace the processes of creating landscapes that memorialise not only ethnic conflict but the multiple political conflicts that unfold in time and space

Lateral colonialism: exploring modalities of engagement in decolonial politics from the periphery

This article contributes to an understanding of how the world outside the Global North is complicit in the visibility politics that render spaces of harm relevant or irrelevant to the reproduction of racism. Extending insights from decolonial theorising, we examine the colonial matrix that produces ongoing legacies of violence and racism through the case of Cyprus. As a peripheral location, Cyprus has been invisible to this story yet had a role in the distribution and mitigation of colonial violence through the institution of what we call lateral colonialism. Through this concept, we explore how peoples otherwise situated and outside the purview of these violences (non-colonisers and non-Blacks) were also enveloped and complicit in them. The case of Cypriots in Africa helps delineate three modalities of this involvement: governmental, entrepreneurial and religious. Lateral colonialism, we argue, is indispensable in linking decolonial possibilities to a global political agenda. The paper re-scripts Africa into Cypriot histories and Cyprus-qua-periphery into the decolonial narrative. In this double sense, lateral colonialism excavates connections that have been forgottern and obscured