Refugeehood and the Postconflict Subject

Olga Maya Demetriou

Description

Being a "refugee" is not simply a matter of law, determination procedures, or the act of flight. It is an ontological condition, structured by the politics of law, affect, and territory. Refugeehood and the Postconflict Subject explores the variable facets of refugeehood, their interconnections, and their intended and unintended consequences. Grounded on more than a decade of research on the island of Cyprus, Olga Maya Demetriou considers how different groups of "refugees" coexist and how this coexistence invites reinterpretations of the law and its politics. The long-standing political conflict in Cyprus produced not only the paradigmatic, formally recognized "refugee" but also other groups of displaced persons not so categorized. By examining the people and circumstances, Demetriou reveals the tensions and contestations within the international refugee regimes and argues that any reinterpretation that accounts for these tensions also needs to recognize that these "minor" losses are not incidental to refugeehood but an intrinsic part of the wider issues.
Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. The Imbricated Structures of Refugeehood

2. Framing: The Governmentality of Major Losses

Part I. Layers: Notes Toward A Global Everyday

3. Dissenting Losses: The Affective Register

4. Governing Loss: The Legal Register

5. Rooting Loss: The Topological Register

Part II. Crevices: From the Refugee- Citizen to the Abject Refugee

6. Minor Others

7. Unhomely Subjects

8. Enemy Refugees

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Human rights
• Civil Rights

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 27 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438471198
• Langue: English

Extrait

Refugeehood and the Postconflict Subject
SUNY series in National Identities

Thomas M. Wilson, editor
REFUGEEHOOD AND THE POSTCONFLICT SUBJECT
RECONSIDERING MINOR LOSSES
Olga Maya Demetriou
Cover image: © 2018 Natalie Demetriou
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Demetriou, Olga Maya, author
Title: Refugeehood and the postconflict subject : reconsidering minor losses / Olga Maya Demetriou, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in national identities | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438471174 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471198 (e-book)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Livia; as ever
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1. The Imbricated Structures of Refugeehood
CHAPTER 2. Framing: The Governmentality of Major Losses
SECTION I. LAYERS: NOTES TOWARD A GLOBAL EVERYDAY
CHAPTER 3. Dissenting Losses: The Affective Register
CHAPTER 4. Governing Loss: The Legal Register
CHAPTER 5. Rooting Loss: The Topological Register
SECTION II. CREVICES: FROM THE REFUGEE-CITIZEN TO THE ABJECT REFUGEE
CHAPTER 6. Minor Others
CHAPTER 7. Unhomely Subjects
CHAPTER 8. Enemy Refugees
CONCLUSION
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIGURE 1.1. Map of Cyprus
FIGURE 1.2. Deryneia viewpoint
FIGURE SI.1. Paintings by Costas Economou
FIGURE 3.1. Development of the refugee stamp
FIGURE 3.2. Dhen Xehnó (I don’t forget) educational campaign
FIGURE 5.1. Greek-Cypriot military guard post in downtown Nicosia
FIGURE 5.2. Sites from the Green Line Tour
FIGURE 5.3. Ledra Palace Hotel in its heyday and in ruin
FIGURE 5.4. Impressions from Nicosia airport
FIGURE 5.5. National Cemetery at Tymvos (Tumulus) near Nicosia airport
FIGURE SII.1. Imbrications on the Green Line
FIGURE 7.1. Turkish-Cypriot women sewing sandbags in December 1963; tourists and nurse stranded in Ledra Palace Hotel in 1974
FIGURE 8.1. Property development in Nicosia
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Cyprus is UN recognized country in Europe. It shares a border with Akrotiri and Dhekelia.” This is how a virtual assistant we received as a Christmas present in 2017 answered my test question, meant to check the manufacturer’s geographic biases: where is Cyprus? For the uninitiated, naming two British military bases as border-sharing entities would be the equivalent of describing Cuba as the territory extending north of Guantanamo. More ludicrous appeared the emphasis on these two borders by comparison to the line that divides the island into a UN-recognized state and one that is not. Over the course of a decade, I have received innumerable answers to ontological questions about Cyprus, and they have never failed to astonish me, putting into question what I thought I knew about where I come from.
In the course of that questioning, this book has incurred debts to all those who have provided answers and those who have opened up further questions, debts that are impossible to enumerate here. The people at the center of this book are owed the most: they have shared thoughts under difficult circumstances in many cases, answered prying queries, and walked me through their worlds patiently showing me aspects of postconflict life in Cyprus that I would probably not have fathomed otherwise. Many of them are represented here under ethnographic pseudonyms. To those whom, because their roles have been so public, I could never hope to anonymize effectively, I owe a special thanks for allowing their words to appear in public.
For unwavering support and encouragement over many years, I thank Yael Navaro, Elizabeth Anne Davis, Maria Hajipavlou, Jane Cowan, Louiza Odysseos, Effi Voutira, and Gisela Welz. For discussing themes of interest to the book (borders, refugeehood, displacement, citizenship) in ways that made the insights sharper, I thank Sarah Green, Hastings Donnan, Rozita Dimova, Cindy Horst, Engin Isin, and Jackie Stevens. And for commenting on different parts Fionnuala Ní Aolain, Julian Reid, Toula Liasi, Antonis Ellinas, Eleni Meleagrou, Costas Constantinou, and Theodoros Rakopoulos. Other colleagues engaged with the realities of Cyprus, many through kindly accepting invitations to speak to local audiences, in ways that opened new understadings of the relationships across geographical and disciplinary fields: Veena Das, Costas Douzinas, Kerem Öktem, Sossie Kasbarian, Alexandra Zavos, and Liza Schuster. I hope we continue to construct such bridges across fields, and to places as yet unfathomable.
For collaborations that contributed to the exploration of borders, I thank the contributors to The Political Materialities of Borders volume: Lenio Myrivili, Stef Jansen, Tuija Pulkkinen, and Chiara de Cesari. This, and other projects I have been involved in were the places where I originally posed many of the questions in the book: the CRIC project funded by the EU’s FP7 program (#SSH–217411), COST’s EastBordNet action (#IS0803), the PCC’s projects on loss and refugeehood, PRIO’s Aftermath of Hotspots project (#802495). And of course, the project that started it all many years ago, the Wenner Gren’s postdoctoral project on Insecure Minorities.
At the other end, for seeing the book into production, I want to thank the team at SUNY Press: Tom Wilson, for his encouragement right from our first exchange; Michael Rinella and Rafael Chaiken, for patience and support in the initial stages; my two thoughtful and discerning reviewers; Jenn Bennett, for accommodating timing and formatting requests; and Fran Keneston, for making sure the presentation reflected what I wanted to say. And not least, Therese Parent for thoughtful copy editing that left just enough scare quotes to reassure me in dispensing with the rest.
Writing the book has been an exercise in reflection: on theory and practice, on the home and the field, on experience and analysis. On all those counts, my exploration of gender would not have been the same without the Gender Advisory Team, among them Doğuş Derya, Eleni Apeyitou, Nayia Kamenou, and Umut Bozkurt. The insights of Neshe Yashin, Gregory Ioannou, Marios Sarris, Murat Kanatli, Lisa Dikomitis, Vassos Argyrou, and Pafsanias Karathanassis aided further this reflection. And the connecting threads across themes and between knowledge and communication would not have been as clear without the help of my students at the University of Cyprus and many of my colleagues there—the support of the late Ceasar Mavratsas has been invaluable and his absence keenly felt. For welcoming me into a new beginning at Durham, I thank Elisabeth Kirtsoglou, Jutta Bakonyi, Stephanie Kappler, Shaun Gregory, and John Williams.
As ever, family debts are difficult for their sheer inevitability. The lives of my grandparents and those most close to them, spent in Cyprus as subjects of various regimes—from the dimming Ottoman Empire, through British colonial administration, to Cypriot statehood and its punishing conflict, the war of 1974, and the long process of restoration into which I grew up—kept reminding me that citizenship is a matter of time as well as, or even rather than, geography. Their stories have been catalytic to the shaping of the questions I ended up asking. From younger relatives I learnt to grapple with that legacy in public, in performance, and in silence. I especially thank Yiannos Economou for allowing use of his father’s art, and Natalie Demetriou for the wonderful work on the cover, and Nicolas Demetriou for assisting. Discussions with Erdal Ilican have offered a wealth of insight on formal and informal perspectives from the other side, and their at times strange confluence. I owe a debt to my parents for what they said and didn’t say that shaped this book over decades. And to Tania, for being around whenever. To Murat for many of the ideas explored, many careful readings, and for insisting on the matters at stake. The discussion of enemy subjects in particular condenses much of his insight and work. To Livia, for great patience—yet again, and for pushing me to reconsider, everything and always.
ONE
THE IMBRICATED STRUCTURES OF REFUGEEHOOD
DISPLACEMENTS
It is summer 2003, a little after Turkish-Cypriot authorities announced they would no longer prevent people from crossing in and out of a self-declared state in northern Cyprus, across the island’s Green Line boundary. Masses have been flocking to checkpoints since that late April declaration, venturing into places they had not visited since the bloody period of the 1960s and the war of 1974. A restaurant in the old commercial center of northern Nicosia is preparing for the evening’s clientele. As we sit down, a friend joins our table for drinks. There is excitement over the opening of the border. We reminisce at how the last time we met some mo