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.

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

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.

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.

Designing Peace examines how institutional innovation impacts peace building in divided societies. Drawing on examples from Bosnia, South Africa, and Northern Ireland, the book demonstrates how institutional lessons from elsewhere could be applied to future negotiations in Cyprus and its broader region.

Bahriye Kemal's ground-breaking new work serves as the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective. Her book explores Anglophone, Hellenophone and Turkophone writings from the 1920s to the present. Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan’s humanistic geography and Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist philosophy, Kemal proposes a new interdisciplinary spatial model, at once theoretical and empirical, that demonstrates the power of space and place in postcolonial partition cases. The book shows the ways that place and space determine identity so as to create identifications; together these places, spaces and identifications are always in production. In analysing practices of writing, inventing, experiencing, reading, and construction, the book offers a distinct ‘solidarity’ that captures the ‘truth of space’ and place for the production of multiple-mutable Cypruses shaped by and for multiple-mutable selves, ending in a 'differential’ Cyprus, Mediterranean, and world. Writing Cyprus offers not only a nuanced understanding of the actual and active production of colonialism, postcolonialism and partition that dismantles the dominant binary legacy of historical-political deadlock discourse, but a fruitful model for understanding other sites of conflict and division