Cyprus

Feminism in Cyprus: Women’s Agency, Gender, and Peace in the Shadow of Nationalism

Citation:

Kamenou, Nayia. 2020. “Feminism in Cyprus: Women’s Agency, Gender, and Peace in the Shadow of Nationalism.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 22 (3): 359–81.

Author: Nayia Kamenou

Abstract:

This article explores the ways in which feminist and women’s agency is articulated in the Cypriot context through the paradigms of nationalism, peace, and conflict. It does so to broaden our understanding of gendered and peace agency in troubled and divided societies, in which complex and conflicting discourses meet. Analyzing data from interviews with feminist and women’s groups’ representatives, it examines how nationalism and women’s approaches to gender, politics, peace, and conflict enable or restrict feminist and women’s agency. It finds that a strategic essentialist approach has initiated a reconfiguration of gender(ed) power relations, women’s agency, and peacebuilding processes. It argues that when this approach is combined with feminist theory and praxis and the employment of transnational peace paradigms, the possibilities for feminist and women’s agency increase, as long as feminist scholarship and grassroots activism inform each other through dialogue. Therefore, it highlights the nuanced and complex dialectic between essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist gender discourses. Moreover, it challenges theories that posit a rigidly hierarchical relation between local and transnational gendered and peace agency paradigms, by demonstrating their malleability and reciprocity. Thus, it contributes to the debate about the modalities and possibilities of feminist sociopolitical intervention in nationalism- and conflict-ridden contexts.
 

Keywords: Cyprus, feminism, gender, nationalism and peace, women's agency

Topics: Conflict, Feminisms, Gender, Gendered Discourses, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Nationalism, Peace Processes, Peacebuilding Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2020

Displacement, Memory and Home(Less) Identities: Turkish Cypriot Women’s Narratives

Citation:

Aliefendioğlu, Hanife, and Pembe Behçetoğulları. 2019. “Displacement, Memory and Home(Less) Identities: Turkish Cypriot Women’s Narratives.” Gender, Place & Culture 26 (10): 1472–92.

Authors: Hanife Aliefendioğlu, Pembe Behçetoğulları

Abstract:

This study is an analysis of the narratives of Turkish Cypriot women in the north of Cyprus who were displaced during the ethnic conflict between the 1950s and 1974. We have conducted 21 interviews with Turkish Cypriot women who were living in different parts of Northern Cyprus. We used oral history, both as a method and as an epistemological stance to re-phrase the near past of Cyprus and the Cyprus issue from the perspective of gender/women’s studies. The study follows the traces of modernity, patriarchy, and nationalism in women’s narratives, about the place, home, belonging and homelessness. The narratives describe Turkish Cypriot women’s experiences of being a woman in conflict and displacement (‘göçmen olmak’ in daily talk in Turkish) making a home out of a house and undertaking daily routines for their families. The study also reveals that ethnic conflict and displacement have empowered women to a certain degree.

Keywords: Cyprus conflict, displacement, home, Turkish Cypriot women, women's narratives

Topics: Conflict, Displacement & Migration, Ethnicity, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Nationalism Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2019

Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity in Post-Conflict Cyprus

Citation:

Efthymiou, Stratis Andreas. 2019. Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity in Post-Conflict Cyprus. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Author: Stratis Andreas Efthymiou

Annotation:

Summary:
This book uses empirical research to introduce the relationship between nationalism, militarism and masculinity. The co-constitution between these three factors is susceptible to change and hinders reconciliation, according to the author. Drawing on the case of Cyprus, a country in conflict with Turkey, Efthymiou reveals how nationalism, militarism and masculinity were constructed after the war, and re-adapted following the opening of internal borders and European Union accession.
 
Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity in Post-Conflict Cyprus draws on rich field-research, with soldiers and officers in army barracks, politicians such as former President of Republic of Cyprus Glafkos Clerides, leaders of radical far-right movements and the Greek Cypriot public. The book offers invaluable insight into the application of nationalism, militarism and masculinity in governmental policy including by the Cyprus Defence Ministry, and will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, gender studies, peace studies, security studies, politics and international relations, as well as governments and NGOs. (Summary from Palgrave Macmillan)
 
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Becoming a Man in a Post-conflict Society
 
Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity After the Construction of the Border
 
Nationalism After the Opening of the Border
 
Militarism After the Opening of the Border
 
Masculinity After the Opening of the Border
 
Radical Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity After the Opening of the Border
 
Cypriot Energy: Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity on the Maritime Boundaries
 
Conclusion: A Journey Through the Juncture of Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity

Topics: Conflict, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Governance, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Nationalism Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2019

Anger and Sadness: Gendered Emotional Responses to Climate Threats in Four Island Nations

Citation:

Du Bray, Margaret, Amber Wutich, Kelli L. Larson, Dave D. White, and Alexandra Brewis. 2019. "Anger and Sadness: Gendered Emotional Responses to Climate Threats in Four Island Nations." Cross-Cultural Research 53 (1): 58-86.

Authors: Margaret du Bray, Amber Wutich, Kelli L. Larson, Dave D. White, Alexandra Brewis

Abstract:

Climate change presents an important threat to community livelihoods and well-being around the world. Biophysical vulnerability to the effects of climate change, such as sea level rise, coastal erosion, changing flora and fauna, and changing precipitation patterns are predicted to affect island nations in particular. Emotional geographies offers a theoretical entry point to understand how changing landscapes, which are often imbued with emotion and personal significance, may result in heightened emotional states and result in different outcomes depending on the severity of these changes and the biophysical vulnerability that produces them. Historically, emotion and gender have been closely linked; we use biophysical vulnerability to climate change, along with emotion and gender, to argue for a differentiated perspective on how men and women in different places may experience different emotional responses to climate change. Using a cross-cultural analysis of qualitative data from four island countries (Fiji, Cyprus, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom; total N = 272), this article explores how different sensitivities to climate change may produce differentiated emotional responses among men versus women across these four sites. Our results indicate that gender does affect the emotional response of respondents in these sites, but that local sensitivity plays an important role in differentiating these emotional responses, and their causes, between the four sites.

Keywords: climate change, gender, emotion, island nations

Topics: Environment, Climate Change, Gender, Livelihoods Regions: Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Oceania Countries: Cyprus, Fiji, New Zealand, United Kingdom

Year: 2019

A Multilevel Intervention: The Case of the Cyprus Gender Advisory Team (GAT) Achievements and Challenges

Citation:

Hadjipavlou, Maria, and E. Biran Mertan. 2019. "A Multilevel Intervention: The Case of the Cyprus Gender Advisory Team (GAT) Achievements and Challenges." Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 14 (2): 125-37.

Authors: Maria Hadjipavlou, E. Biran Mertan

Abstract:

In this article, we discuss Gender Advisory Team (GAT)’s multilevel linkage strategy—Macro–Meso–Micro—in promoting women’s ideas and views on the different issues discussed at the negotiating table and raising public awareness on GAT’s recommendations regarding the issues of governance and power sharing from a gender and feminist perspective as well as on property, economy, citizenship, and education in a federal reunited Cyprus. In this article, we give examples only on governance and citizenship. Our feminist take on these issues necessitates a perspective that transcends the ethnic divide and includes the Women, Peace and Security agenda. We argue that Cypriot women’s concerns, needs, and gender mainstreaming as well an inclusive process should be prioritised at all levels of institutions. We conclude with GAT’s impact and challenges.

Keywords: Cyprus, multilevel strategy, gender, conflict, negotiation, recommendations, feminist perspective

Topics: Citizenship, Ethnicity, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gender Mainstreaming, Gendered Power Relations, Governance, Post-Conflict Governance, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2019

The Impact of Women's Activism on the Peace Negotiations in Cyprus

Citation:

Demetriou, Olga. 2018. "The Impact of Women's Activism on the Peace Negotiations in Cyprus." Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 24 (1): 50-65.  

Author: Olga Demetriou

Abstract:

This article focuses on Cypriot women's activism and the work of the Gender Advisory Team (GAT). Referencing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, GAT produced specific recommendations to the negotiators and third parties to the Cyprus peace process. In this article, we discuss GAT's recommendations regarding governance and power-sharing from a feminist perspective and the application of a gender-ethnicity nexus in the context of citizenship and belonging. Comparing the parameters used to discuss citizenship in the ongoing Cyprus peace negotiations with those of the 1960 Constitution, in this article we also examine shifts in governmentality through the conflict and postconflict periods, concentrating at each point on presumptions about gender. We argue that current discussions about citizenship are partly the result of unacknowledged considerations of gender, which have been placed on the table by gender activists. This situation poses a question about how we are to interpret the paradoxical incorporation of activist women's voices in peace processes.

Topics: Conflict, Ethnicity, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Governance, Constitutions, Post-Conflict, Peace Processes, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2018

Gender, Conflict, Peace, and UNSC Resolution 1325

Citation:

Shekhawat, Seema, ed. 2018. Gender, Conflict, Peace, and UNSC Resolution 1325. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Author: Seema Shekhawat

Annotation:

Summary:
"There is an increasing amount of literature on various aspects of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. While appreciating this scholarship, this volume highlights some of the omissions and concerns to make a quality addition to the ongoing discourse on the intersection of gender with peace and security with a focus on 1325. It aims at a reality-check of the impressive to-dos list as the seventeen years since the Resolution passed provide an occasion to pause and ponder over the gap between the aspirations and the reality, the ideal and the practice, the promises and the action, the euphoria and the despair. The volume compiles carefully selected essays woven around Resolution 1325 to tease out the intricacies within both the Resolution and its implementation. Through a cocktail of well-known and some lesser-known case studies, the volume addresses complicated realities with the intention of impacting policy-making and the academic fields of gender, peace, and security. The volume emphasizes the significance of transforming formal peace making processes, and making them gender inclusive and gender sensitive by critically examining some omissions in the challenges that the Resolution implementation confronts. The major question the volume seeks to address is this: where are women positioned in the formal peace-making seventeen years after the adoption of Resolution 1325?" (Shekhawat 2018)
 
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Gender, Peace, and UNSC Resolution 1325
Seema Shekhawat
 
1. Redefining Women’s Roles in Internationl and Regional Law: The Case of Pre- and Post-War Peacebuilding in Liberia
Veronica Fynn Bruey
 
2. The Contribution of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women to the Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325
Antal Berkes
 
3. Faith Matters in Women, Peace, and Security Practices
Elisabeth Porter
 
4. Creating or Improving a National Action Plan Based on UN Security Council Resolution 1325
Jan Marie Fritz
 
5. Widowhood Issues for Implementation of UNSCR 1325 and Subsequent Resolutions on Women, Peace, and Security
Margaret Owen
 
6. The Commodification of Intervention: The Example of the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda
Corey Barr
 
7. Beyond Borders and Binaries: A Feminist Look at Preventing Violence and Achieving Peace in an Era of Mass Migration
Aurora E. Bewicke
 
8. The Disconnection between Theory and Practice: Achieving Item 8b of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325
Onyinyechukwu Onyido
 
9. Gender and Feminism in the Israeli Peace Movement: Beyond UNSCR 1325
Amanda Bennett
 
10. Conflict Ghosts: The Significance of UN Resolution 1325 for the Syrian Women in Years of Conflict
Emanuela C. Del Re
 
11. The UNSC Resolution 1325 and Cypriot Women’s Activism: Achievements and Challenges
Maria Hadjipavlou and Olga Demetriou
 
12. Victims, Nationalists, and Supporters: UNSCR 1325 and the Roles of Ethnic Women’s Organizations in Peacebuilding in Burma/Myanmar
Mollie Pepper
 
13. Gender and the Building Up of Many “Peaces”: A Decolonial Perspective from Colombia
Priscyll Anctil Avoine, Yuly Andrea Mejia Jerez, and Rachel Tillman
 
14. “It’s All About Patriarchy”: UNSCR 1325, Cultural Constrains, and Women in Kashmir
Seema Shekhawat

Topics: Armed Conflict, Conflict Prevention, Displacement & Migration, Feminisms, Gender, Peace and Security, Peacebuilding, Peacekeeping, Peace Processes, Religion, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS, UNSCR 1325 Regions: Africa, MENA, West Africa, Americas, South America, Asia, Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Colombia, Cyprus, India, Israel, Liberia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Syria

Year: 2018

Living Archives and Cyprus: Militarized Masculinities and Decolonial Emerging World Horizons

Citation:

Agathangelou, Anna M. 2017. “Living Archives and Cyprus: Militarized Masculinities and Decolonial Emerging World Horizons.” Critical Military Studies 3 (2): 206–11. 

Author: Anna M. Agathangelou

Abstract:

Huddled within the most influential theorizations and praxes of war and violence are imaginations of collating masculinities, texts and their embodiments. Interpreting and reading my mother as a non-dominant body, and her stories about war, violence, and Cyprus as re-iterative corporeal insights and practices challenging such toxic masculinities, I argue that such performances and embodiments (what I call living archives), albeit with multiple tensions, re-orient us to emerging decolonial horizons. In doing so, I directly challenge and unsuture the complacent IR historiographies of security and war and the ways they insist on composing and writing by bringing together certain archives (i.e., images of violent places and state documents) and silencing those which systematically and consistently point to modernity’s violent frameworks including their production of violent masculinities on which extinguishment and futures lie. Such an insistence colludes with certain toxic regimes of representation expecting certain subjects, sovereigns, and institutions to order and reiterate (produce) colonial and violent racialized masculine (and racialized feminized) practices between ourselves and the world. Living archives are also those invented signs, imaginations, and excesses that press materiality and its impasses (i.e., in the form of capture, blackness, non-genders, etc. and resolution of signs and fictions), exposing the limits of modernity’s fictioning, and gainst any resolution and labor that produces violence all the while sublating it.

Keywords: militarized masculinities, Cyprus, living archives, the colonial, imperial wars, decolonial struggles, international relations grammars

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Femininity/ies, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Race, Security, Violence Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2017

The Militarization of Opulence: Engendering a Conflict Heritage Site

Citation:

Demetriou, Olga. 2012. “The Militarization of Opulence: Engendering a Conflict Heritage Site.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 14 (1): 56–77. doi:10.1080/14616742.2011.631286.

Author: Olga Demetriou

Abstract:

This article investigates the processes through which a site, thought to encapsulate the history of the Cyprus conflict, has been militarized in multiple ways. Defined as a site of negotiation since its opening, Ledra Palace Hotel has instead been a place where conflict has diachronically persisted. The masculinization and militarization of this environment is addressed within a gender-focused analysis that emphasizes the normalization of violence. This approach reveals the political potential of acknowledging conflict dynamics hitherto obfuscated by hegemonic conceptualizations of ‘the conflict’.

Keywords: Cyprus buffer zone, development, gender in conflict, Subjectivity

Topics: Gender, Women, Masculinity/ies, Gender Analysis, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarization, Violence Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2012

No Permission to Cross: Cypriot Women’s Dialogue across the Divide

Citation:

Hadjipavlou, Maria. 2006. “No Permission to Cross: Cypriot Women’s Dialogue across the Divide.” Gender, Place & Culture 13 (4): 329–51. doi:10.1080/09663690600808429.

Author: Maria Hadjipavlou

Abstract:

Much scholarly attention has been given to the study of the gendered aspect of ethno-national conflicts trying to understand the experiences of men and women in a conflict situation and to what extent these shape different types of intervention for peacemaking and peace-building. Are women's experiences of conflict different from men's? Do women have a different voice than the mainstream dominant discourses produced by patriarchal systems? Do women in conflict societies respond to militarism and the violation of human rights differently from men? Are women's needs for identity and peace different depending on which ethnic–religious group they belong to? Are their needs different from those of men? This article will try to answer the above questions focusing on a feminist understanding of conflict in Cyprus. The main contention put forward in the article is that gender is an important factor to take into account when conflict societies are engaging in peace processes. To this end, data are analysed from different inter-ethnic women's workshops in which the author was either a participant–observer, or a facilitator. This analysis of the data demonstrates that Greek and Turkish Cypriot women's voices and experiences are diverse and multiple. Both men and women are socialised in the same nationalist paradigms, a fact that can explain how in the initial phases of the dialogue processes both groups of women tended to reproduce official discourses. Their own experiences and differentiated voices began to emerge only after a gendered understanding of the conflict was introduced and trust and conflict resolution skills were instituted in the dialogue process. Drawing attention to the gradual shift of perspectives in the context of inter-ethnic workshops, the article concludes by arguing that women's dialogue can challenge the omnipotence of the state and may open up a new space whereby a diversity of perspectives and mutual trust can emerge.

Flying Away to the Other Side

Our birthplace is split in two and we

Are caught on barbed wire-hybrids

Turk and Greek alike

‘Is it December is it July

Choose your Side

Are you Turkish or Greek

There's no Purgatory in between’.

… … … … … … … … … … …

We cannot be from both Sides

Because we are two, one and the other

You refused to believe in

We are loneliness itself (M. Yashin 2000)

Topics: Civil Society, Ethnicity, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Military Forces & Armed Groups, Militarism, Nationalism, Peacebuilding, Peace Processes Regions: Europe, Southern Europe Countries: Cyprus

Year: 2006

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