Syrian Refugees and the Digital Passage to Europe: Smartphone Infrastructures and Affordances

This research examines the role of smartphones in refugees’ journeys. It traces the risks and possibilities afforded by smartphones for facilitating information, communication, and migration flows in the digital passage to Europe. For the Syrian and Iraqi refugee respondents in this France-based qualitative study, smartphones are lifelines, as important as water and food. They afford the planning, navigation, and documentation of journeys, enabling regular contact with family, friends, smugglers, and those who help them. However, refugees are simultaneously exposed to new forms of exploitation and surveillance with smartphones as migrations are financialised by smugglers and criminalized by European policies, and the digital passage is dependent on a contingent range of sociotechnical and material assemblages. Through an infrastructural lens, we capture the dialectical dynamics of opportunity and vulnerability, and the forms of resilience and solidarity, that arise as forced migration and digital connectivity coincide

Intercultural Conflict and Dialogue in the Transnational Digital Public Sphere: Findings from the MIG@NET Research Project (2010-2013)

The MIG@NET European FP7 research teams spanned eight countries examining gender, migration and digital networks (http://​www.​mignetproject.​eu/​). Here the researchers outline the key findings covering migrant hybrid (online and offline) activities in three European countries: Greece, Cyprus and the UK. This European multicase study provides insights into the general sociocultural dynamics behind the formation of transnational digital networks because they reveal the most urgent societal problems European countries must face in the early twenty-first century: racism, migration, ethnonationalist ideologies and European citizenship

Diaspora Policies, Consular Services and Social Protection for Cypriot Citizens Abroad

peer reviewedThe diaspora policies that Cyprus has implemented have been largely overlooked in the literature and in empirical studies. While several pieces of work have explored Cypriots abroad, there are no systematic studies that delve into the diaspora policies that the Cypriot government has put forward for non-resident nationals. Hence, this chapter aims to discuss the diaspora engagement policies that Cyprus implements at the economic, political, and socio-cultural levels, as well as to explain the Cypriot diaspora engagement based on the particular historical and political context of the country and the characteristics of its diaspora. In addition, the chapter sheds light on the niche area of social protection policies towards the Cypriot diaspora, with a particular focus on the policy areas of unemployment, health care, pensions, family-related benefits, and economic hardship.Migration and Transnational Social Protection in (post-)crisis Europe (MiTSoPro

De-linkage Processes and Grassroots Movements in Transitional Justice

Transitional justice literature has highlighted a negative relationship between enforced disappearances and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Little attention has been paid to how human rights issues can become stepping-stones to reconciliation. The article explains the transformation of the Cypriot Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) from an inoperative body into a successful humanitarian forum, paving the way for the pro-rapprochement bi-communal grassroots mobilization of the relatives of the missing. By juxtaposing the experience of Cyprus with other societies confronting similar problems, the article shows how the issue of the missing can become a driving force for reconciliation. The findings indicate that a policy delinking humanitarian exhumations from the prospect of a wider political settlement facilitates positive transformation in protracted human rights problems and opens up a window of opportunity to grassroots actors

Between Nationalist Absorption and Subsumption: Reflecting on the Armenian Cypriot Experience

First paragraph: The Armenian community is one of the three recognized national minorities of Cyprus, together with the Maronites and the Latins (Roman Catholics), identified in the 1960 constitution (Article 2 and 3) as "religious communities" and considered part of the state fabric. In the broad context of dominant opposing nationalisms—Turkish and Greek—a minority position can theoretically act as a challenge to exclusionary narratives. Minorities can test and interrogate the nuances and limits of "imagined communities" and illustrate life on the margins— necessarily liminal, pragmatic and adaptable. In the landscape of codependent Greek and Turkish nationalisms, the Armenians (and other minorities) can be assumed to represent an "other" way of being Cypriot