Olga Demetriou

Prioritizing 'ethnicities': The uncertainty of Pomak-ness in the urban Greek Rhodoppe

This article shows how Greek government policies have affected group relations within the minority in western Thrace and how identification within the minority has changed over the last five decades, particularly as regards the concept of Pomak-ness. According to the official Greek terminology, the minority is “a (singular) Muslim minority made up of Gypsies, Pomaks and people of Turkish origin”, while official Turkish rhetoric maintains that the minority (again in the singular) is wholly Turkish. As will be shown in the article, most of the minority members living in the Rhodoppe area of Thrace prefer to classify themselves as Turkish, although minority urbanites insist on differentiating themselves from “others” in a number of ways, including the use of such labels as “Pomak” and “Gypsy”. I here try to examine the content of the former, in order to illuminate the content of “Turkish urban Komotinian” identity.

The Militarization of Opulence

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’.

The Original Turkish State: Opposing Nationalism in Nationalist Terms

On the night of July 4, 2004, Greeks across the globe celebrated their national teams triumph in winning the European Championship Cup of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). The victory had been unexpected and the celebrations, which lasted until the next morning, largely spontaneous. Urban streets everywhere in Greece filled with people clad in Greek flags and in plastic replicas of Alexander the Greats helmet; cars hooted past, horns blowing to that well-known five-and-six-beat rhythm signifying soccer victory, the air thick with the bright fumes of celebratory crackers. In the towns of Thrace, where the majority of Greeces Turkish population lives, the scene was the same: loud, celebratory, and full of nationalist symbols. In Komotini, the capital of Thrace, minority members watched and listened, some with apprehension, others with excitement about the unexpected victory.

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. Heideggers 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.

Conflicts and Uses of Cultural Heritage in Cyprus

This paper examines the conflicts and politics of heritage within communities and across the ethnic divide in Cyprus. By looking at three case studies of religious, antiquarian and modern heritage, it underscores the selective appropriations and restorations of heritage as well as problems of heritage identification and protection. Specifically it is concerned with the status of churches and building of mosques in the northern part of the island, the symbolic uses of the Kyrenia shipwreck and its replicas, and the difficulty in politically appropriating the ruined Nicosia airport that is located in the UN Buffer Zone.

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

ABSTRACT 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 Turkish Oedipus: National Self and Stereotype in the Work of a 1960s Greek Cartoonist 1

This article analyzes a particular type of radical political discourse in Greece—namely the articulation of stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness in the work of Mendis Bostantzoglu, a Greek satirist and cartoonist. The author examines a poem and a sketch published in the 1960s, in which stereotypes of Greek-ness and Turkish-ness are presented and mocked. Relating their production to their specific historical context and current academic discussions in Greece on nationalism and Otherness, the author argues that the ways in which ethnic stereotypes of “self” and “other” are used to discuss political issues have more to tell about internal Greek issues (such as a critique of the government and its policies) than about Greeces foreign affairs. Such analyses, it is further argued, also lead to a greater appreciation of the complex and implicit sets of meanings negotiated by the stereotypes themselves.

Conflicts of Heritage in the Balkans and the Near East: Editors' Preface

Heritage destruction in conflict zones has been studied under a variety of guises, including demolition of monuments, looting of artefacts, improper change of usage, deliberate neglect, heritage ethnicization and de-ethnicization, among others. Conflict zones have also featured highly publicized reconstruction preparing for or following a peace settlement. The destruction of heritage is widely linked to the targeting of symbolic sites of communal identity and the increase of levels of distrust between rival communities, whereas reconstruction purportedly aims at reestablishing this trust and recreating cross-communal bonds and solidarities. What has been less discussed is the extent to which ethnic conflict has often amplified heritage conflicts that pre-existed the advent of communal violence. That is to say, conflicts over cultural resources inherited from the past are essentially about representation and interpretation, especially over what the past expresses in terms of values and beliefs about ‘us’ vis-à-vis ‘others’. Less examined has also been the paradox that conflict has—in certain contexts—preserved heritage as an unintended consequence of freezing development. Identifications, uses and contestations of heritage have had, therefore, diverse power implications and served a wide range of policies and political agendas: ranging from logics of partition to logics of reunification, from ethnic cleansing to inter-ethnic understanding, and from enhancing conflict continuation to assisting conflict transformation. Currently, there is an increasing recognition by both theorists and practitioners of the value of heritage for society as a whole and for ‘heritage communities’ in particular, including in areas of conflict, meaning in effect that heritage can no longer be—if it ever was— the preserve of experts and national governments. New heritage norms, individual and collective rights and national obligations have emerged through conventions at both European and international levels and provide new perspectives from which to view, critique and understand heritage practice. Papers in this Special Issue come from a PRIO Cyprus Centre conference that took place in Nicosia in November 2010, under the auspices of CRIC, a EU FP7 project on ‘Identity and Conflict: Cultural Heritage and the Re-construction of Identities after Conflict’. The CRIC project ran from 2008 until 2012 and investigated the links between identity, conflict and heritage through case studies in Spain, France, Germany, Bosnia and Cyprus. It specifically examined how the destruction and subsequent reconstruction of heritage impact on social life and identity formation and affect notions of belonging at both individual and collective levels. The theme of the conference was ‘Conflicts and Values of Heritage’, quite pertinent in the Cyprus case but also in the wider Near East and the Balkans.

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

This article focuses on Cypriot womens 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 GATs 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 womens voices in peace processes.

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

Abstract 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.