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