Women's Organizations for Peace: Moving Beyond the Rhetoric of the Cyprus Problem [1st ed.] 9783030459451, 9783030459468

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-ix
Introduction: Women Organizing for Peace (Sophia Papastavrou)....Pages 1-27
Review of the Literature (Sophia Papastavrou)....Pages 29-50
Theoretical Framework (Sophia Papastavrou)....Pages 51-65
Women’s Voices, Women’s Wisdom (Sophia Papastavrou)....Pages 67-98
Conclusion: Fumbling Towards Sustainable Peace (Sophia Papastavrou)....Pages 99-110
Back Matter ....Pages 111-113

Citation preview

Women’s Organizations for Peace Moving Beyond the Rhetoric of the Cyprus Problem Sophia Papastavrou

Women’s Organizations for Peace

Sophia Papastavrou

Women’s Organizations for Peace Moving Beyond the Rhetoric of the Cyprus Problem

Sophia Papastavrou Women, Peace and Security Network Canada Nicosia, Cyprus

ISBN 978-3-030-45945-1 ISBN 978-3-030-45946-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45946-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Herstory Yιαγια´ (Grandma) stands up from the kitchen table and, hitting her hand on the table, begins to explain parts of her life to me: Life with your grandfather was like being in a sea full of waves…we were followed by the British everywhere we went. One day a British officer came to the house, he and others broke down the front door of our house. They searched the house from top to bottom. They almost destroyed the house. In the end they found nothing and left. Your grandfather was taken away shortly afterwards and sent to Seychelles on March 9, 1956. He wrote letters to me and all our children each week. The letters he wrote to me would arrive already opened. The British government had cut out bits and pieces of the letters.

She sits down again and looks at me. It seems that the memories are hard to say out loud. Then she interrupts my thoughts: You know, I supported your grandfather through everything, and I knelt next to him during the war, praying to keep your dad and uncles safe. I raised all five children, during this difficult time, and through all of it your grandfather was full of love, grace and above all faith. Faith for our country, faith in our people, faith in our children but also faith in God.

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My grandmother stops. She gets back up from the kitchen chair again, the one my grandfather once used, and she says, I grew up with no mother, I didn’t know my mother. I was an orphan. I met your grandfather and he became my world and I was his world. He used to tell me, “my angel all we need are olives and bread. Nothing else.” Indeed, we lived in the hands of the Creator and surrendered our lives to Him.

She stops again, and looks me straight in the eye, skipping chapters of her life as if she is resisting sharing them. Or perhaps her hesitation lies in the mere fact that in Cypriot culture it is common for women to not share the difficulties, challenges, and traumas of their lives. This would be taboo, especially when it comes to me, her granddaughter. But hesitantly, she explains, We [our family] suffered a lot during the EOKA period and during the [anti-colonial] struggle, but always asked your grandfather, I said, “Stavros, these are families; the young men that are going to fight, they are just boys. These are mother’s sons.” And he used to listen to me and assured me that to fight for freedom was indeed a blessing.

There are great prices to pay for freedom, and my grandmother, along with the rest of our family, was on the British Colonial Administration watch lists. My grandmother recalls the almost daily raids of British soldiers, who would knock down the front door to search their home for material that would enable them to arrest my grandfather on charges of treason against the British Crown (for being a leader in the anti-colonial movement). My grandmother’s memories and oral history of this period in her life, living side-by-side with the unrest and trauma of surveillance and gendered violence, are ones that haunt me to this day. During my preliminary archival research in Cyprus in 2012–2013, she passed away at the age of eighty-six in October 2012. I was indeed fortunate to be able to speak with my grandmother about her life experiences during British colonial rule and the EOKA period, which she recounted as the most important in her life, before she passed on. Herein lies not just the stories of heroism, but also stories of the complexities, intricacies, and lived experiences of war and the power conflict itself has to change the direction of our lives. Nicosia, Cyprus

Sophia Papastavrou

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the many gifted, talented and brave individuals who opened their hearts and minds to make sure I could provide the best piece of work possible. My intention to study women’s organizing for peace in Cyprus was engrained in the need to go back to my roots. I am honoured to have been allowed to enter the spaces of women’s peacebuilding, and I am grateful to write the stories of activism featured in this text. The women in this research tell their experiences of resilience and courage. Featured here are the pioneers in their field who have played a pivotal role in shaping gender issues, and peace and reconciliation activism in Cyprus. I am humbled to have met each and every one of you. I am thankful for your willingness to speak to me and for opening your hearts in ways beyond my expectations. Women’s stories matter. It is my hope that this text will bring about the belief, ownership and agency women have when asked to share their lives with the world. Nicosia 2018

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Contents

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Introduction: Women Organizing for Peace

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Review of the Literature

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3

Theoretical Framework

51

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Women’s Voices, Women’s Wisdom

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Conclusion: Fumbling Towards Sustainable Peace

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Women Organizing for Peace

Abstract This chapter has introduced the study and provided some important background and context on Cyprus laying the foundation for why this book is important to peacebuilding and the wider conversation around women, peace and security. Keywords Women’s civil society · Social movements · Cyprus Problem · United Nations Resolution 1325

Introduction The long-term consequence of the Cyprus conflict, referred to by the international community as the Cyprus Problem, has for the past 44 years taken precedence over women’s rights and gender equality on the island. The Cyprus Problem refers to the inter-ethnic conflict that led to the island’s division since 1974. In relation to the feminist literature on antiwar and peace activism, Cyprus is a site in which women are involved in a peace process in a “frozen conflict”.1 This book examines three women’s organizations that have been working within the bicommunal peace 1 I use the term frozen conflict in two ways. First to identify that the conflict is frozen in time and second that its people live in a state of waiting for the Cyprus Problem to be solved. Cyprus as a place where most people live in the in-between.

© The Author(s) 2021 S. Papastavrou, Women’s Organizations for Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45946-8_1

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movement in Cyprus. The organizations’ roles have included: mobilizing to create awareness for peace during significant periods in Cypriot history, such as the opening of the Green Line in 2003 when Turkey began allowing border crossings in the oldest divided city in the world (Nicosia); the final Annan Plan of 2004; and women’s groups’ campaigns in 2014 to demand that women be included in the working groups on both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot peace negotiating teams. The research centralizes women’s civil society organizations and their multilayered methods of protest, as well as the ways in which multigenerational women have sought to make their voices heard during peace negotiations. Women’s groups have organized to fight against the continuing absence of rule of law and human rights that has resulted in the island becoming a base for trafficking women for forced sexual exploitation and violence throughout Europe and the Middle East. To explore women’s activism on the island, I chose to focus on three of the longstanding groups: Hands Across the Divide (HAD); the Gender Advisory Team (GAT) and the Mediterranean Institute for Gender Studies (MIGS). The central research questions for this study are: (1) How have women’s groups organized for peace? (2) What have been their key issues and organizing strategies? (3) What have been their organizing successes and challenges? HAD was established in 2001, with its mission being to bring women from both the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities to work together on bicommunal activities to promote peace. The women are comprised of academics, grassroots activists and journalists committed to bringing women’s issues and participation to the forefront of peacebuilding. In 2011, Hands Across the Divide (HAD) registered as an NGO in the Republic of Cyprus, thus making it the first bicommunal organization to do so. HAD was the first bicommunal women’s organization in Cyprus, which is significant because it includes both Greek and Turkish Cypriot women who share a vision of a peaceful, non-divided, non-militarized, non-patriarchal Cyprus. In 2009, a Gender Advisory Team (GAT) was formed by a small group of women, including members of Hands Across the Divide (HAD), with the hope was that gender equality would be integrated into the peace negotiations. GAT’s overarching mission is to mainstream gender equality in the peace process, by ensuring women’s active participation in all phases of the process and by gender-proofing the content and basis of future peace agreements. The organization’s aim has been to identify ways in

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which gender considerations can be integrated into the Cyprus peace process at the macro level. GAT includes women activists, members of NGOs, academics, researchers, parliamentarians, gender focal points and others, from both Cypriot communities. GAT has engaged with the UN Secretary-General’s (SG) Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus on issues related to gender and citizenship, property, governance and the economy. GAT has also worked with HAD and MIGS to lobby for change in the public discourse regarding the inequalities women experience in Cyprus. Under the auspices of the University of Nicosia, MIGS was founded in 2000 as a research centre and institute that works to promote women’s rights in Cyprus. The organization has been actively involved, both as a coordinating institution and as a partner with the University of Nicosia (formerly Intercollege), in the administration and implementation of programming. MIGS is a small group of feminists whose mission is to address women’s rights and to work against the discrimination of women in the sectors of education, civil society, peace negotiations and global initiatives. Unlike HAD and GAT, whose members work on a volunteer basis, MIGS is funded completely by the European Union, and each of its members is paid for the work conducted with a broad network of scholars and researchers who have expertise in gender-related areas and who focus on the Mediterranean region and the European Union. Through telling the story of these three women’s groups, my research is both thought-provoking and challenging because I bring to the forefront the following: the ways in which these specific women’s groups women mobilized for the participation and inclusion of women’s perspectives at the peace negotiating table; and the difference between peacebuilding and official negotiations that serves as a reminder of the complexity of the Cyprus Problem. The interviews conducted with the members of each group were 15 in total some of the interviewees were also dual members, which is common among civil society organizations on the island, and even more so in women’s groups. The members are essentially part of an elite cluster involving the same women, usually due to limitations in geography, but also because of limited interest in island-wide bicommunal organizing.

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In this study, I will also centralize United Nations Resolution 13252 in the context of Cyprus to shed light on how the women’s organizations have supported the resolution or the demands of the resolution (i.e. demand for a role at the negotiation table in the peace process before the resolution or afterwards). I will also identify how the three women’s organizations are funded. If the women’s organization has received funding, I investigate the national and international donors’ agendas and how activists have responded to the Cyprus Problem in order to understand cooperation within anti-war and peace organizing. Throughout the research on Cyprus, I am concerned with understanding why the women in the case studies have chosen to participate in grassroots programmes, particularly in bicommunal work, and how these organizations have emerged and developed, as well as how they have declined, succeeded or failed. An analysis of each group documents and provides access to information on member dynamics, participation at early stages of members’ decision-strategies within the groups, and the institutionalization of protests/campaigns. My qualitative research applies a transnational feminist lens to inform the data collection and analysis by troubling the connections between how gender is created, what is being produced and reproduced on the margins, and who speaks for whom and under what conditions. Historical constructions of women as needing male protection from “enemy” assault are part of the military narrative in Cyprus, which positions the army as a privileged body within the society. The nation, constructed on the basis of ethnicity and “the purity of blood”, has seen these aspects become part of the political DNA, and this narrative has been passed on from generation to generation. Anthias and YuvalDavis (1989) maintain that women’s involvement in the processes of war and national struggles allows them to take the forms of reproducers of 2 United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 is the first time this international male-dominated body has recognized the gendered nature of war, conflict, peace and security. The unanimous adoption of such a document is a testament to the recognition of gender inequities and inequalities, as well as an acknowledgement of women’s contributions to preventing and resolving conflicts around the world. Furthermore UNSCR 1325 addresses the impact of war on women and girls, and the section on protection includes women’s rights, protection of women from gender-based violence, particularly rape, and other forms of sexual abuses. It also stresses the pivotal role women and girls play in conflict management and sustainable peace, and addresses women as leaders and active agents. Resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace and Security” is vital in that it is the first time the Security Council has focused its attention exclusively on women as agents in their own right, in both situations of conflict and in transition from conflict.

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members of ethnic groups and of participants in both the ideological and ethnic collectives and the transmission of their culture. As such, multiple identities and differences are rejected by the nation state that works to meet the needs of the status quo in order to run smoothly. In the case of Cyprus, this has resulted in established alternative spaces in and around a landscape which is heavily militarized by Turkish, Greek and UN troops on the island. Reconciliation is a fragmentary process and a journey that happens over a period of time. In the case of Cyprus, reconciliation remains an ongoing and often convoluted process. The word reconciliation in Greek is symphiliosi (to find common ground), and in Turkish, uzla¸smak (to meet in the middle; mediation). Each translation represents a sense of commonality but also distance. It is within these two subtle differences that women’s activism in Cyprus occurs through a complex fusion of ethnic division, occupation, militarism, nationalism and patriarchy. The women’s movement works within a highly militarized state on the island of Cyprus, and is multilayered. Its activism seems to reclaim and legitimize women’s roles in both the public and private spaces of society. The women’s movement itself has been a slow and difficult process, and it has been heavily reliant on organizing at the grassroots level and within the safety net of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Mine Kanol, a feminist activist and educator, explained the complexities of being a feminist in a Turkish Cypriot community in the north: There are two sides. It was a big struggle in my home when I was reading about feminism, and I told my parents off a lot about their patriarchal structures within the family, but it wasn’t really working and they were defensive. Now I feel like, for us [feminists], once you become more aware you want to change things very quickly. It is really frustrating, but I find, for me, the more quickly the less results. I am taking my activism a little slower now whenever I hear my parents or immediate family or friends who are sexist or say a gay joke and I don’t like it. I try not to be aggressive and [I] talk to them another time when it is not such a heated discussion. [It is] hard to change older people and it is such a lost cause, and that is why I care about education and why we need really good teachers and [to] start at an early age, and [why] this generation is killing me. I am demotivated because I cannot find the right way to go. [Feminists] cannot depend on one women’s organization. There needs to be a network [whether] national or international. You cannot do it alone. (M. Kanol, interview, March 2014)

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Indeed, women’s organizing is carved out from women’s communities that are fragmented within the divided communities themselves.

Politics of Location The case of Cyprus, women, and conflict is an epistemological endeavour that I have been personally, intellectually and methodologically driven to pursue. My experience as a woman of the Greek Cypriot diaspora and as an immigrant and Canadian, as well as an EU citizen, and my interest in the impact of war on gender and women are a result of the Turkish military invasion of 1974. The term “invasion” is used predominately by the Greek Cypriot population and some Turkish Cypriots to explain the events of 20 July 1974, following the Cypriot coup d’état on 15 July 1974, while the dominant term for Turkish Cypriots and Turks is “intervention”. For this study, I use the term “occupation” to highlight how my own family’s narrative has influenced my understanding of and relationship with Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. My family’s participation in changing the course of Cyprus history, or at the very least in playing a part in both anti-colonial and nationalist movements on the island, has also played a major role in my choice to use a transnational feminist lens on Cyprus. As Todorova (2007) affirms “I see the power of feminist politics that are now democratized, globalized and self-critical” (p. 209). This further empowers me to address my own politics of location in terms of the way I am perceived within the political and social fabric of Cypriot society (both in the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” and the Cyprus Republic) is based on a family legacy entrenched in the Cypriot imagery of historical events that would eventually lead to my parents fleeing the country in 1975 and being unable to return for a decade. The “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, known to those living on the island as “the north” or the “TRNC”, was created after the Turkish invasion of the island in 1974. The terminology of “north” to identify the “TRNC” is politically sensitive because of its illegal recognition as a de facto state. With the exception of Turkey, the “TRNC” is not recognized by the international community as a country. The population is made up of 150,000 to 160,000 Turkish immigrants who came at the request of the government of Turkey, and who are regarded as “illegal settlers” by the Republic of Cyprus. The Cyprus Republic represents the south of the island, is legally recognized by the international community, and is an EU member state.

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My family background, particularly the stories of my grandmother, has driven me to investigate how gender and the spaces that people negotiate, both within their own families and communities, are impacted by the consequences of such struggles, specifically for women. From the beginning, I was thus very sensitive to the need for creating an environment in which all of the participants in this book would be able to speak in a way that would be true to themselves, and also for providing a safe space for them, knowing that each has been touched by the war itself and that deep wounds still remain. My desire has not been to understand or document my own relationship to the Cyprus Problem or its cause, per se, but to provide a platform to engage in the way war and displacement are interconnected with how women’s activism is both enabled and constrained in a divided country.

Research Focus While the “F-word” (feminism) is not often used proudly by women and men for that matter, a few fierce women continue to be actively engaged in the fight for gender equality in Cyprus. Josie Christodoulou, a member of MIGS, explained: Women in Cyprus did their best to organize in solidarity as a movement, but they did not have one voice. I see the women[’s] political organizations will not act towards women’s rights on gender equality if these subjects clash with the ideology of their political group. And for me this is an issue, a huge issue. If women’s political organizations put the political interests in front of themes like domestic violence and women’s rights, then this is not female movement. There are all these cases of killing women, raping girls, there are victims of physical abuse. Every day there are victims of abuse and nobody tells us this [due to underreported cases]. (J. Christodoulou, interview, April 2015)

Tegiye Birey, a Turkish Cypriot and former GAT member, explained in her own words her impression of a Cypriot women’s movement: [The] women’s movement in Cyprus was [the start of a] change. As I said, we are not located in the similar social structure – you are always the minority as a [Turkish Cypriot and] discrimination, I think, this instinct makes you think differently and forced to see things differently [in terms of] structures and positions. I think when women are working in civil

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society, their different perspective of things start[s] from a different point of view. If you have individual interests [as a result of] patriarchy and if you need to push things you just advocate for equality more than the others. Look at the council members [in the north, and] we have the feminist friends as well, which is great. Positions of power [and] even the way of meetings change. We need to arrange a time that they can attend and [still do their] work and child care. Minor revolutions make a difference. Not sure at the international level, it all works differently. Local level has more advantages than the international level, but when you go up, I feel like you need solidarity from like-minded women to change some things. I think women have benefited – not all of them, of course, but in their personal lives, having the agency to change whatever they see fit. We cannot generalize. I think this makes an impact on our personal lives. Women living in the north formed organizations [in order to have a] safe space to talk about things and put their ideas out there. Not possible if they were at home. Making your voice heard made a big difference. [We need to reach out] to the rural areas since most of the things (events etc.) are in Nicosia. Mobilization in rural areas, and this is a class issue, a lot of us, especially in the context of Cyprus, any peace initiative needs to be bicommunal [and] requires a minimal level of English, mostly English-speaking women. There have been women who had minor opportunities to be active anyways and didn’t have a chance to get involved. (T. Birey, interview, March 2014)

As Birey discussed, there is a history of many women not getting involved in these movements. Perhaps this is because, for a long time, women’s organizations have been linked directly to political parties, with women serving as auxiliary workers during elections—making “tea and sandwiches”—and also being limited to raising funds for male-driven and male-led causes. Women’s activism has thus been limited and accessible only to those comfortable with engaging in feminism, a situation that has become a double burden for activists, who work on a shoestring budget and convey internationally sanctioned gender mainstreaming policies to island populace. The women’s movement in Cyprus must also negotiate within a vast militarized environment, which has made it immensely difficult for communities to address or even consider sexism. Additionally, this challenge is embedded in the very fabric of an antifeminist and misogynic discourse that is systemic. It is therefore important to ask: what price do women pay when they choose to become the face of feminism in Cyprus? Mine Kanol affirmed many such difficulties experienced by women on the island:

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I think women’s movement is a hard struggle, not because we are the most suffering group of women in the world, I don’t think we are, but because discrimination is subtle [and is] hidden in patriarchal structures. [It is] hard to convince people there is patriarchy and women are discriminated against. This idea of questioning yourself. Am I just making a big deal out of this [for no reason?] But there are indicators, and then you, I, see it clearly and [it is] hard to make other people see it. Women in Cyprus [they see] … clear signs [like] how many women are MPs? You can see it there? Psychological violence. I give this example, my grandmother’s father beating his wife with a big club and this was a known thing. And I just don’t understand it when people [in] our generation say “but the Cypriots are so nice,” and they have this culture of being nice. But you were beating your wife [for] 20 years [and] it could not have changed so drastically [since then]. (M. Kanol, interview, March 2014)

When I began preliminary and archival research in 2012–2013, it did not take much to reveal the widespread prevalence of sexism, discrimination and the denial of women’s rights on the island. Women’s activists in Cyprus experience numerous difficulties, as women must negotiate multilevel perspectives of power relations. These include gender, ethnicity, sexuality and religion, which are all engaged within a critical analysis of the issues surrounding women. Cypriot women’s activism has indeed been left out of the mainstream historical narrative, which is based on patriarchal assumptions around women and war simply because the Cyprus Problem and its contested peace negotiations have dominated the national agenda. Feminist activism therefore has been channelled within the maledominated culture of political parties and trade unions, and this has limited the reach of women’s issues, particularly that of feminist agendas. The patriarchal structure of political parties themselves, and of the very fabric of Cypriot society, are deeply embedded with the narratives of Greek and Turkish Cypriot ethnicities, religions, traditions and cultures. “the (re)production of the nation by expecting women to produce and attend to the children and men to attend to work. In sum, it silences, with a series of violent interventions, the struggles and labour of producing a home, a family and a nation” (Agathangelou and Killian 2002, p. 23). Heterosexuality is a primary component of the system of patriarchy, and sexual assault is a method of violating and dominating women’s sexuality. As such, in Cyprus, where heteronormativity and patriarchy make up the structure of society, issues surrounding gender and women’s rights are unimportant to the nation state, which has run smoothly because

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the needs of male-dominated institutions are met, while the issues of women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, the rights of migrant workers, and human trafficking, for example, remain immaterial. At the heart of the matter is that women’s rights in Cyprus are silenced by both men and women every day, in small and big ways, and often without them realizing it, because the Cyprus Problem has perpetuated misogyny, abuse and discrimination against women and because violence and military occupation have become normalized. Human trafficking and sexual exploitation occur in alarming proportions. Additionally, women in Cyprus have yet to realize the full extent of their rights and entitlement to be listened to and have their needs honoured. All too often, Cypriot culture insists that women put their needs, rights and ambitions aside for the maintenance of the nation state, and many women have accepted the belief system their families have taught them for generations. Some of these teachings are that women are listeners not speakers, caregivers not care-receivers and followers not leaders. The cycle of violence continues to move through patterns of sexism, abuse and violence that are passed on from mothers to daughters. Silencing emotions, which is often common in village communities, and the multigenerational experience of women’s voices being silenced, their reality denied, and their needs ignored, mean that a strong platform from which to fight for women’s rights on the island, even in cases of atrocious sexual abuse and violence, is required. In reviewing the feminist debates by charting the meta and macro ways that women are understood in post-conflict conditions, I have found that feminist activists in Cyprus assert that male leaders decide the fate of the country and that women’s voices, including their own, are not being taken into consideration nor included as part of the formal peace negotiations. Particularly of note, is that women risk losing their friends, family and communities when they become involved with such organizations, which many feminist activists have experienced when going against the status quo of adhering to nationalist and ethnic divides. Additionally, women’s participation in peacebuilding is being ignored. I also affirm that the formal peace process in Cyprus is rooted in the fact that issues around the lack of gender equality and, more importantly, the inclusivity of women are left out, and that this has a profound impact on women’s rights throughout the island. It shows an insufficient investment in technical gender expertise, poor quality gender analysis, a complete lack of gender assessment or evaluation and piecemeal response to gender equality in programming. Instead, the peace process requires

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sufficient human and financial resources to affect gender mainstreaming and capacity building into hard sectors. The gender and security agenda has become lost and neglected in the current peace talks (Geneva, January 2017), and thus the work of women’s groups regarding gender equity in the peace talks has resulted in nothing more than the continuation of the disturbing, gender-blind standards and discriminatory structures and practices perpetuated on the island.

Research Significance and Context This book in its entirety engages with women who are largely focused on bicommunal activism in Cyprus and on peacebuilding through multi-level perspectives of power relations that include, for example, race, gender, ethnicity and/or religion, and who engage in critical analysis of the issues surrounding women and war. Bicommunalism is rooted in conflict resolution theory (Vogel and Richmond 2013). The concept of bicommunalism in Cyprus stems from the ways in which particular communities were divided based on ethnicity which was defined by that language, and also affiliation with Greece or Turkey. The draft constitution for the independent Republic of Cyprus, which incorporated the Basic Structure agreed upon at the Zurich Conference, distinguished the communities in a way that maintained particular kinds of policies, discourses and practices that were and continue to be enabled in Cyprus, while others became marginalized or disabled (Constantinou 2007). The colonial legacy left by the British solidified how the Cypriots identify themselves, which includes always hyphenating their identity to include whether they are Greek or Turkish. Being simply and singly Cypriot is a constitutional impossibility due to the Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus (Constantinou 2007). The Cypriot identity has not evolved along with the changing demographics of peoples on the ethnically diverse island. Therefore, colonialism and the imperial discourse of British rule have solidified the dominant bicommunal framework as a legacy on the island. The UN and other international actors, along with civil society, including women’s groups, have worked within these parameters. In 1997, under the auspices of the United Nations Mission in Cyprus, bicommunal peace workshops were held in the buffer zone at the Ledra Palace Hotel. The UN Security Council declared bicommunal activities, in its Resolution (1092/1996), to be of utmost importance to the peace and stability of Cyprus (Cockburn 2004). In addition, a bicommunal

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conflict resolution process in Cyprus that involved working with citizens from the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities, as per the UN Resolution, would also be part of the UN-brokered confidence-building measures. A Bicommunal Steering Committee, founded under the UN and with funding from the U.S. Embassy, brought a conflict facilitator named Benjamin Brew from the U.S. to establish the Cyprus Bicommunal Conflict Resolution Trainers Group. Academics, lawyers, educators and members of civil society from both communities were invited to join the group and to attend the conflict resolution workshops. After the workshops, the participants who had attended became part of the Bicommunal Development Programme (BDP),3 which evolved from the training and was funded by the UN, and began to develop new initiatives. While bicommunalism was used to distinguish differences in the two ethnic communities, “the result was a polarized duality and affirming that diminish affinity of other groups like Armenians, Maronites and Latins living on the island. With BDP evolved to Action Cooperation and Trust (UNDP ACT)” (P. Mentesh, interview, March 2015). In the months leading up to the Annan Plan, the BDP introduced small grants to address post-solution4 federalism and other concerns related to the Plan itself. The UN allocated core funding to environment, education and genderfocused projects to be undertaken by members of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities. Then, “the Greek Cypriot media and the Republic of Cyprus held an inquiry [to collect] evidence of the work the UN was doing in Cyprus in relation to small grants related to the promotion of a solution to the Cyprus Problem. Activists in the south were exposed and shamed in[to] getting involved in working with the ‘Other’ under the guise of bicommunalism and inevitable peacebuilding” (P. Mentesh, interview, March 2015). A new programme established by UNDP-ACT I (phase 1) was begun in the post-Annan period that resulted in both the fatigue and mistrust of the bicommunal movement and the UNDP would turn its efforts to grassroots projects in civil society. The work of bicommunal activism among civil society members has to deal with many obstacles. The women’s groups examined in this book 3 “The Bicommunal Development Programme was created by the UN to foster interaction and contact between the Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities” (P. Mentesh, interview, March 2015). 4 Post-solution refers to the period after an agreement to the Cyprus Problem has been established and it has been voted on in a referendum.

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bounce from transnational to binary work as a result of the complexity of activism in a divided society that is identified as either Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot. Bicommunal work has had little impact on changing the hearts and minds of the status quo due to the creation of a bicommunal elite who are well connected and have unlimited access to international bodies like the UN and the diplomatic community on the island. Bicommunal projects, while sometimes guided by the UN and the official peace negotiations process, are also combined with decisions and actions made by grassroots peace groups. HAD and GAT are supported by the UN Mission in Cyprus, recognized within bicommunal civil society, and are run on a volunteer basis. While both groups have submitted grant applications for projects, the funding goes directly to the project itself, and thus each member also works full-time to support themselves and their family. MIGS receives funding from the European Union, but the focus of the funding tends to change each year, which leaves MIGS members working towards issues that are inevitably EU focused. For example, female genital mutilation (FGM), which is a priority of EU funding and aid, is not a practice in Cyprus; however, Cyprus does receive asylum seekers who are reported to be FGM survivors. Therefore, MIGS works to support the pan-European effort to combat FGM. While MIGS may want to focus on women, peace and security and/or issues that concern women and girls in Cyprus, its choices are largely dictated by whether the concerns are an EU priority, as this will affect the organization’s funding. As such, the issue of funding and how women organize for peace in Cyprus are dictated by and large from outside and/or are dependent on international donors. Amidst all of this, bicommunal civil society seeks to bring together the views of the two major ethnic groups, Greek and Turkish Cypriot, which limits and disavows the voices of people living in Cyprus who are of multi-ethnic and multiple diverse backgrounds. When interviewed, Tegiye Birey suggested that women members have benefited in their personal lives from having the agency to change. She went on to say that: this makes an impact on our personal lives. Women formed groups as [a] safe space to talk about things and put their ideas out there, which would have not been possible if they were at home. Making your voice heard made a big difference, but this is a class issue for a lot of us – especially in the context of Cyprus, any peace initiative needs to be bicommunal, which

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requires a minimal level of English [and] mostly English-speaking women. [There have been] women who had minor opportunities to be active anyways and didn’t have a chance to get involved. (T. Birey, interview, April 2015)

The issue of language, ethnicity and culture play a key role in how women’s groups managed to organize and how they experience inequality on the island. The language issue is a barrier to the work being done by members of HAD, GAT and MIGS, as are gender and notions of feminism. For example, I found that not all members in the women’s groups in this book know the others’ language, and thus everyone relies heavily on English. Additionally, English was the predominant language during the 80-year period of British colonial rule. While women of Armenian, Latin, Maronite, British, Australian, Canadian and even Argentinian descent are active members of HAD, GAT and MIGS, these members and the members that self-identify as Greek and Turkish Cypriot continue to work within the dominant discourse and narrative of the Cyprus issue. Achieving gender equality among each group requires women in leadership roles in the political parties, gender parity, women sitting at the formal peace negotiation tables, education that is gender-sensitive, and addressing the issues of domestic abuse, violence and human trafficking. Gender also intersects with LGBTQ issues on the island, but this area continues to be discussed as secondary to the formal narrative of the Cyprus Problem that is embraced by the mainstream media and leaders and their negotiating teams. This is the tension within which HAD, GAT and MIGS must negotiate. Each group member has learned to weave in and out of this tension, while others remain on the margins, as gender is at the bottom of the list of priorities within the reunification process. While each group works towards addressing gender inequality in Cyprus, their work is still deeply embedded in a hyper-masculine discourse of us versus them, despite the groups claiming the contrary, resulting in the silencing of certain voices and enabling of others. Sub-groups within the groups themselves also take form, especially within this bicommunality. One example of this, given during interviews, was when MIGS’s director Susana Pavlou briefly worked with GAT members Maria, Magda, Olga and Biran at the beginning of the organization’s peacebuilding efforts when the United Nation’s Good Office in Cyprus drafted a list of women in Cyprus civil society who should be involved. Pavlou stated, “In some ways, MIGS members have become disillusioned with GAT,

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despite the good work that has resulted, [as] its members are not on the same page and women were put together either identifying as Turkish Cypriot or Greek Cypriot, which was limiting because I do not identify as a GC [Greek Cypriot] or a TC [Turkish Cypriot]” (S. Pavlou, interview, March 2015). On one hand, the work of the three organizations overlaps, but working towards gender equity does mean something different for everyone. The development of women’s activism has occurred within Cypriot civil society and in non-formal ways to address the issues of patriarchal structures, gender inequality, anti-militarism and resistance. It is within the establishment of women’s organizing that I am interested in contributing to what is happening on the ground with this research. The women’s groups in this book highlight women, conflict and peacebuilding in Cyprus, which are areas of study that have largely remained at the margins of political and humanitarian agendas. In foregrounding the work of HAD, GAT and MIGS, this book engages with the ways in which privilege, agency and positionality connect, and examines how women’s organizing for peace on the island allows for specific voices to be heard while others remain silenced. By focusing on the work currently being undertaken by these three groups, my project brings the under-analysed material on women’s organizing in Cyprus to the surface of international interventions in post-war reconstruction, and it offers avenues for analysing the dynamic and often messy ways that women’s activism and war trauma occur. Additionally, the study affirms the demands on activists towards the mainstreaming of gender through United Nations Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. In engaging with these organizations, I highlight the complex role that the United Nations plays in shaping a specific kind of gender agenda that these organizations are pressured to follow especially around issues of gender-based violence and agency of women in peace and security. The three women’s organizations attempt to be inclusive in dealing with conflict and in working to advance gender equality practices across the island, by incorporating women’s perspectives and voices in peace negotiations that go beyond the European Union, United Nations.

Historical Narrative Cyprus is located in the easternmost part of the Mediterranean Sea and is, according to Greek mythology, believed to be the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The island is six hundred miles east

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of Greece, forty miles south of Turkey, and a hundred miles west of Lebanon (Markides 1977). Cyprus’s ideal geographic location in the Mediterranean made it a target of colonial conquest. The empire in control of the Eastern Mediterranean was also likely to lay claim to the island. Foreign rule has had various influences on the island’s history, from the Mycenaeans, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians and Romans, to the Ptolemics, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians, Turks and British (Hadjipavlou 2010; Markides 1977). The island’s population is roughly 80% (ethnically identified) Greek, 18% Turkish, and 2% Armenian, Maronite, Latin and Roma (Hadjipavlou 2010). Though Cyprus has always been ruled by outside forces, the most profound influence on the island was Mycenaean rule largely due to the introduction of Hellenism. The migration of Mycenaean populations from mainland Greece resulted in the establishment of a Greek culture, language, art and religion (Markides 1977). By the fifth century, when the Byzantine Empire took hold of the island, a Hellenic way of life had become part of the inhabitants’ daily life. In the following centuries, the population spoke Greek and adhered to the Orthodox Christian religion even when Roman Catholic Frankish and Venetian rulers took over the island in the Middle Ages. Cyprus fell to the invading forces of Lala Mustafa Pasha and the island came under Ottoman rule in 1571. During Ottoman rule, a Muslim, Turkish-speaking community settled on the island, reinforced by Catholic and Orthodox Cypriots who converted to Islam for tax and other reasons during the three centuries the Sultan ruled the island. Unlike many other immigrants, the Muslim minority did not assimilate into the larger Greek Orthodox one due to their religious differences (Faustmann 2017). The Ottoman period also left a problematic legacy in many other aspects. Cockburn (2004) expressed that “the Ottoman heritage that some Turkish Cypriots might wish to give more legitimacy [to] as an element within ‘Cypriot’ identity was an extreme case of a militarized, imperialist and polygamous, male power system” (p. 43). The structural roots of the so-called Cyprus Problem, which culminated in the invasion and partition of the island in 1974 by Turkey (2011),5 date back to the start of British colonial rule. In 1878, the Ottomans leased Cyprus to Britain in exchange for protection against Russia (Richter 2010). Since Britain was not part of the region and not 5 See for the perception of Turkey by both Cypriot communities: R. Bryant & C. Yakinthou, 2012, Cypriot Perceptions of Turkey (Istanbul: Tesev Publications).

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expected to stay forever, the question over the future of the island after the end of British rule divided the two communities. While the Greek Orthodox majority aspired to the unification of the island with Greece (enosis), the Muslim community was staunchly opposed to this goal, would adopt gradually a Turkish identity and aim for either the preservation of British rule or failing that the return of the island to the Ottoman Empire or, after the foundation of modern Turkey in 1923, to Turkey. Confronted with Greek Cypriots’ increasing demands for enosis after Britain annexed the island during the First World War, the British intensified a policy of divide and rule which fuelled further distrust between the Greek and Turkish communities, while at the same time isolating minority groups (Katrivanou and Azzouz 2009). The British colonial government implemented new laws, institutions and practices in order to secularize and “civilize” the island and its people. The British elites found the geography, archaeological and linguistic connections to Hellenism so familiar that they identified the inhabitants as Greeks (Varnava 2009), while at the same time they eroticized and Orientalized the unknown, or the “other” (Morgan 2011). Under British rule, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots continued to live together rather peacefully, and co-habited in the major towns and in numerous villages. During colonial life, in a time of subsistence agriculture, women’s experiences were limited to the home and to working in the fields. Although elites of Turkish, Greek, Latin, Maronite and Armenian descent were educated, the majority of the colonized population lived in poverty. In fact, “the relationship between the colonial administration and the Cypriot economy has been succinctly described as a benign neglect. It was never the British colonialists’ intention to develop the Cypriot economy within the imperialist machinery because the island was valued not for its natural resources or abundance of exploitable labour but for its strategic location…[therefore] significant industrialization was absent” (Taki and Officer 2013). After the end of the Second World War, during which Cypriots from both communities contributed to the war effort, Greek Cypriots expected to be rewarded with enosis, and the movement to unite Cyprus with Greece resurfaced. Faced with a British refusal to ever leave the island and only offers for limited self-administration, the Cypriot Left and Right decided to internationalize the Cyprus dispute and brought the request for the right of self-determination to the United Nations in 1954 (Faustmann 2001). When the UN failed to support the Greek and

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Greek Cypriot claim, the Greek Cypriot Right started an anti-colonial struggle led by the National Organisation of Cypriot Struggle (EOKA) organization. Headed by the Greek Orthodox Church, Greek Cypriot youth, men, and a few women became a political arm of the anti-colonial struggle and rallied against British rule. In response, the Turkish elites, with the assistance of the colonial administration and Ankara, created the Turkish resistance organization (TMT), which promoted uniting the island with Turkey, a position that shifted in 1956 to “taksim”, the partition of the island. Within both TMT and EOKA, women were banned from taking leadership positions. Female EOKA and TMT supporters participated in street demonstrations, hid fighters in their homes from the British soldiers, sewed uniforms, distributed nationalist pamphlets and boycotted British made products (Hadjipavlou 2010), but the political Left, minorities and other ethnic groups on the island were excluded from these movements. Both ethnic groups on the island turned to mainland Greece or Turkey for support, and this resulted in the involvement of Athens and Ankara, bringing them to the brink of war (Faustmann and Solomou 2011). After four years of armed struggle, which also resulted in the killings of Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leftists and waves of violence between both communities, in 1959 a compromise was finally reached that neither party had wanted: an independent Republic of Cyprus based on a power-sharing agreement between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities. Britain retained two sovereign bases, which secured its strategic plans in the greater Mediterranean. Britain, Greece and Turkey guaranteed the independence and territorial integrity of the island in the London–Zurich agreement of 1959 (Katrivanou and Azzouz 2009). With this agreement, both Greek and Turkish Cypriots were named as the two official ethnic groups. Britain, Greece and Turkey agreed to hand Cyprus its independence in 1960 based on power-sharing between the 82% Greek Cypriot majority (78% actual Greek Cypriots and the remaining were Armenian, Latins and Maronites) and 18% Turkish Cypriot minority (Faustmann and Solomou 2011). When Cyprus became independent, Maronites, Latins and Armenians had to collectively choose to be members of either the Greek Cypriot or the Turkish Cypriot community (Constantinou 2007). Britain, Greece and Turkey became Guarantor Powers of the new political arrangement, and Ankara and Athens obtained the right to station 650 and 950 troops, respectively, on the island.

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Only three years after independence in 1963, inter-ethnic conflict broke out, inflamed by mistrust, fear and political, as well as ethnic, differences. The removal of British street names, destruction of colonial buildings and installation of Cypriot president (Makarios III) (Morgan 2011) did little to decolonize the country’s people, but it rather intensified the “anxiety of cultural loss” (Loomba 2005) and the need to preserve ethnic heritage. When inter-ethnic conflict erupted, Turkish Cypriots left their homes and moved to restricted enclaves (Katrivanou and Azzouz 2009). After 1963 Turkish Cypriots also ceased to be part of the internationally recognized government of the Republic of Cyprus, which ever since has been led by the Greek Cypriot community. The Turkish Cypriots set up their own administration in their enclaves. Negotiations between the two communities began in 1968. An agreement between the two Cypriots sides proved to be elusive. Therefore in 1972 representatives from Greece and Turkey were formally included in the negotiations but no final agreement could be reached before the Greek Coup against Archbishop Makarios which led to the Turkish invasion of 1974. The prelude to the Turkish intervention started in the early 1970s, when internal strife between Greek Cypriot supporters of the Junta (the military dictatorship which had come to power in Greece in 1967) and followers of President/Archbishop Makarios ensued. This confrontation climaxed in a Greek-sponsored coup by opponents of Makarios in July 1974. This triggered Turkey’s response of invading the island in July and August 1974 and ethnically cleansing its northern part of Greek Cypriots (Faustmann and Solomou 2011). The de facto partition of the island resulted in a northern Turkish Cypriot side and a southern Greek Cypriot side. In the wake of these events, 215,000 Cypriots from both communities lost their homes and have never returned, making about a third of the Greek Cypriots and about half of the Turkish Cypriots internally displaced people. The Turkish Cypriots resettled in the north, while most Greek Cypriots were forced to move to the south of the island. In 1983, the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community, Rauf Denkta¸s, declared the north to be an independent state: the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (“TRNC”). While the international community condemned the declaration and refused to recognize the “TRNC”, it was immediately recognized by Turkey as a state. As a result of the division and as part of a policy to change the demographic character of the north,

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new generations of settlers were subsequently brought from Turkey to the north side of the divided island. A key characteristic of this ethnic conflict is that both sides cannot agree on what the so-called Cyprus Problem is about. In the historical narrative of the Turkish Cypriot community, the Cyprus Problem started in 1963 when Turkish Cypriots were expelled from the government and lost their political rights. The Greek Cypriot official narrative considers the events of 1963 to be a Turkish Cypriot revolt and a voluntary withdrawal from the institutions of the republic in order to achieve the partition of the island. For Greek Cypriots, the Cyprus Problem started in 1974 and is perceived as the invasion and occupation of the island by Turkey, which led to the division and included ethnically cleansing the Greek Cypriot population from the north and along with the internationally condemned establishment of a “state” in the north. The official Turkish Cypriot narrative refers to 1974 as a “Peace Operation” which liberated the Turkish Cypriots who were suppressed and deprived of their rights ever since 1963. Moreover, the Turkish intervention was only a response to a Greek coup and therefore the main responsibility for the events of 1974 lies within Greece and those groups in Cyprus that participated in the coup. Negotiations and talks between the two sides to overcome the division and reunify the island have been going on ever since the forceful division, but so far all have failed. In 2003, with approval from Ankara, Denkta¸s finally agreed to open the partition line that had kept people apart for over 30 years. The opening happened in the context of a UN-sponsored attempt to reunify the island before the Greek Cypriotdominated Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004. UN secretary Kofi Annan, along with committees and leaders from both sides of the island, devised a plan known as the Annan Plan to reunify the island within a federal framework. However, the plan (there were four revisions over a four-year period since the first version was tabled in 2000) was viewed as “pro-Turkish”, and it was rejected in a referendum in April 2004 by the Greek Cypriot majority living on the island while the Turkish Cypriot minority voted in favour of its acceptance. Consequently, the Republic of Cyprus joined the European Union as a divided country in May 2004. While the whole island is internationally considered to be the Republic of Cyprus (RoC), the EU’s Acquis Communautaire is suspended in the north because of the Turkish military occupation and effective inability of the Greek Cypriot leadership to govern the north.

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Ever since the failure of the Annan Plan, numerous rounds of negotiations and intercommunal talks, under the auspices of the United Nations, between the leaders of the two communities have failed to bring about a solution acceptable to both sides. Both sides have been unable to agree on reunification in the form of a bizonal and bicommunal federal solution, although all parties to the conflict have accepted this framework for a solution of the Cyprus dispute since the late 1970s. The most recent phase of the Cyprus talks started in 2008, when, Mehmet Alt Talat and Demetris Christofias led their respective communities. Despite great hopes and major progress, these talks failed to overcome the division and subsequently went into a stalemate when Cyprus took over the rotating presidency of the European Union for six-months in July 2012. During that time, Turkey and the Turkish leadership halted talks with President Christofias and refused to acknowledge the EU presidency. It was not until February 19, 2014 that a joint communique was released by the chief negotiators under the auspices of United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus which led to the resumption of peace talks in spring 2014. Renewed US involvement in the Cyprus peace process, in the context of the hydrocarbon findings in the Eastern Mediterranean in general and off the coast of Cyprus in particular, have provided for new power dynamics and potential incentives to solve the longstanding dispute. On 21 May 2014, US Vice President Joe Biden, the most senior US official to visit in more than 50 years, focused international attention on the EU’s only divided country as the pursuit to find alternative energy routes into Europe heated up. Talks between the two leaders of the two communities, Nicos Anastasiades and Mustafa Akinci, progressed since 2015, though Turkey’s dispute over the gas reserves off the coast of Cyprus repeatedly interrupted the talks. The Republic of Cyprus claims the right to unilaterally exploit the reserves as the internationally recognized government for all of Cyprus, while the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey are adamant that no exploitation can take place without their approval and consent. In July 2017, the island came closer to reunification than ever before; only in the context of the failed 2004 Annan Plan were the hopes and chances for overcoming the partition similarly high. However, the negotiations to overcome the division failed at an international conference brokered by the United Nations, and the guarantor powers (Britain, Greece and Turkey), held in CransMontana, Switzerland on 7 July 2018 making the possibility of permanent partition of the island even more likely. The return of displaced persons

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to their homes and properties has yet to happen. A recent study estimates that about 60,000 to 62,000 people out of approximately 215,000 citizens of the “TRNC” were either born in Turkey or have both parents who were born in Turkey (Hatay, 2017), and the exploitation of Greek Cypriot properties under Turkey has complicated the situation even more, rendering a solution even more of a challenge. The lapse of time without a solution has tended to continue to further normalize the de facto situation. Cyprus has served as a lab for conflict resolution theory and practice since the 1974 events, with both Western and Cypriot scholars alike leading workshops and training sessions on the island, and the subsequent UN systems being firmly rooted in peacebuilding initiatives. From 1998 until 2005, there have been over 300 international organizations working within a population of one million, focusing on peacebuilding activities. Hadjipavlou and Kanol (2008) point out in their review of peacebuilding activities that 200 programmes focused on education, conflict resolution, culture, gender, ethnicity, negotiation and mediation, whereas any emphasis on gender issues affecting Cyprus has been lacking. An international action-research project, coordinated by the CIVICUS Civil Society Index Report for Cyprus and conducted in 2005 in collaboration with Intercollege, the Management Centre of the Mediterranean, and supported by USAID and the UN, articulates some of the key factors that have hindered civil society building and have led to its complexity on the island. Important variables include: the fact that Cyprus became independent 1960 and as such took time to acquire the features of a modern democracy such as human rights and civil liberties; the intercommunal conflict and the de facto division of the island meant that the Cyprus Problem became the core issue; political parties dominate all aspects of the public sphere; the high levels of intolerance, xenophobia and heterosexism that permeate the fabric of social life; and the accession of the Cyprus Republic into the European Union while remaining a divided country. Additionally, the presence of Turkish troops from mainland Turkey in the north of Cyprus and the north’s dependence on Turkey also create obstacles to organizing civil society especially for the Turkish Cypriot population. Such factors are instrumental in laying the groundwork for beginning to understand the dynamics, roles, and multilayered heterogeneity within civil society in Cyprus. Civic participation in civil society remains limited to a select elite group of people coming out of academia. Significant

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social groups on the island, such as migrants, minorities and settlers from Turkey, as well as those from a low socio-economic background, are left out of the majority of CSOs, while men predominately hold leadership positions. There were fewer conflict resolution and dialogue activities after 2000, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 brought along a shift in funding by international agencies to support training and workshops for professionals to “promote inter-communal reconciliation and cooperation through strengthening civil society’s capacity to make its voice heard on policy issues and promoting cooperation in areas of common interest” (Hadjipavlou and Kanol 2008, p. 79). Such common interests included a handful of projects focusing on women and gender issues. Gender mainstreaming in Cyprus has largely been understood and is often used to mean women. Maria Angeli, feminist and MIGS member, underlines that: “In terms of someone talking about gender mainstreaming, usually about how women are not involved in politics in general. In parity democracy and women in politics, it is directly linked to the peace process. The research shows that this is valid and has power as well as impact. Campaigns against violence against women change the discourse of the society. MEPs ask us [MIGS] for the theory of gender to understand and access to knowledge and research, as well as access to what is going on in Europe, laws on gender, knowledge readily available. In Cyprus we have many barriers…narrow-minded policy and government. First it is the politicians. It takes two to tango…again in politics even if you are the best politician in the world and you could struggle for your rights but if the situation society is volatile or against women. Empowerment and women’s solidarity is key” (M. Angeli, interview, April 2014). This is irrespective of the fact that gender mainstreaming includes addressing the needs of women, men, boys and girls, and how those socially constructed roles differ. The focus of gender mainstreaming has remained on women, as Anderlini (2007) notes, “mainstreaming gender can be explained in four steps: 1) it means doing no harm to women or men; 2) it helps ensure that harmful practices that perpetuate exclusion, and the people who practice them, are not reinforced by outside actors; 3) it helps promote good programming by taking into consideration the needs of all beneficiaries; and 4) contribute to promotion of human rights, equality” (Anderlini 2007, p. 202). Cypriot women’s

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organizing for peace focuses on women and women’s issues with the goal of gender mainstreaming in mind to achieve gender parity. Gender inequities are embedded in Cypriot values, institutions, and the fabric of the society. For example, women participants in this book expressed their frustration at the lack of support from families and social services to take on high level decision-making roles. According to LGBT rights activist, Hazal Yolgul, “Women’s movement in Cyprus functions within a highly militarized society imposed; that is very hard for people to talk about sexism, elsewhere difficult to explain feminism, sexism is systematic. Women’s movement does not have a long history in Cyprus and has advanced only in the last 7-8 years. Why is politics seen as a man’s job?” (H. Yolgul, interview, March 2014). Yolgul points out that gender roles are so embedded in the family structure and interventions are difficult to make on an everyday basis, but are slowly starting to happen where a growing number of young Cypriots participate in civil society peacebuilding initiatives and events. The official peace project has no connection to grassroots groups because the male leaders have been deciding the fate of the country for decades. “As women, we don’t see recommendations forward not much connection. Rural communities do not have much understanding. Leaders sees peace process as a business agreement and do not want to hear what people are saying” (H. Yolgul, interview, March 2014). Women are in fact encouraged to stay out of party politics, and the prevailing misogynistic culture affirms that social as well as political structures and processes are not conducive to gender equality. Patriarchal systems are strongly rooted in the ways in which women’s and men’s roles are played out in Cypriot society, which inevitably has an impact on women’s lives at home, in the workplace, and also within their own ethnic communities (Cockburn 2007). Cyprus as a case study is under studied particularly because it does not fully fit the definition of a post-conflict society; rather, it is one where its people live waiting for peace on a divided island. In examining Cyprus in the context of women, this book explores multi-level perspectives of power relations that include race, gender, ethnicity and religion, and engages with women activists involved in the critical analysis of issues surrounding women and war. Women’s activism has developed within Cypriot civil society in non-formal ways to address patriarchal structures and gender inequality, to promote anti-militarism and resistance to occupation by Turkey, and to work for peace and gender justice

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in a post-solution Cyprus. The analysis of the three women’s organizations’ in this book show they attempt to be inclusive in dealing with conflict and in working to advance gender equality practices across the island by incorporating women’s perspectives and voices in peace negotiations that go beyond the European Union, United Nations and the major ethnic groups.

Organization of Research This chapter has introduced the study and provided some important background and context on Cyprus. Next, Chapter 2 presents a review of the scholarly literature that has examined the topic of women and war, specifically feminist approaches that examine gender-based violence and women’s roles in times of conflict, with a focus on women’s social movements and the ways in which they organize for peace. I extend the literature review by including women’s organizations in Cyprus, as there is little knowledge of the various ways in which women organize, not to mention the impact that such conflicts (without the outbreak of war) have on women’s lives. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical frameworks that ground this study and provides a genealogy of women’s organizations in peace negotiations in Cyprus. The theoretical framework is presented as the synthesis of two influential feminist theories: Chandra Mohanty’s theory of transnational feminism and local Cypriot feminist scholar Hadjipavlou and Cockburn’s 2006 theoretical perspectives of women, violence and war. These two theoretical frameworks ground the existing discursive framing on women’s activism and provide a basis for examining the non-formal ways in which women’s organizations have mobilized through cultural production, traditional order and the use of international resolutions on women, peace and security. Chapter 4 presents the case of the United Nations, gender mainstreaming and the UN’s role in women’s civil society on the island. Looking at the time period from 2000 to 2013, this chapter presents the three Cypriot women’s organizations: Hands Across the Divide (HAD), the Gender Advisory Team (GAT) and Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (MIGS). Participants included founding members and current as well as past members, who shared with me their experiences along with their group’s milestones, accomplishments, activities and other events, as well as details on changes in leadership. Key findings discussed in

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the chapter include: when each group was created and how; for what purpose each group’s founding members organized; the main principles and mission of each group; consistencies in their activism within Cypriot society; changes to date, and their successes as well as failures, considering the Cyprus Problem; and the important differences in the ways these three organizations have worked towards peacebuilding over the past 13 years. To conclude, Chapter 5 considers areas of further research and methods in which women’s activism can enrich the women’s movement in Cyprus from an intersectional approach. I highlight the ongoing need for women’s equal inclusion in the formal peace negotiations from a transnational feminist perspective. Finally, this chapter will present the potential for future research to continue to push an intersectional agenda for gender equity and women’s rights island-wide.

References Agathangelou, A. M., & Killian, K. D. (2002). In the Wake of 1974: Psychological Well Being and Post-Traumatic Stress in Greek Cypriot Refugee Families. The Cyprus Review, 14(2), 45–69. Anderlini, S. (2007). Women Building Peace: What They Do, Why It Matters. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner Publishers. Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (Eds.). (1989). Woman-Nation-State. London: Macmillan. Cockburn, C. (2004). The Line: Women, Partition, and the Gender Order in Cyprus. London: Zed Books. Cockburn, C. (2007). From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism, and Feminist Analysis. London: Zed. Constantinou, C. (2007). Aporias of Identity: Bicommunalism, Hybridity and the ‘Cyprus Problem’. Cooperation and Conflict, 42(3), 247–270. Faustmann, H. (2001). The United Nations and the Internationalisation of the Cyprus Conflict 1949–1958. In J. Ker-Lindsay & O. Richmond (Eds.), Promoting Peace and Development in Cyprus Over Four Decades (pp. 3–49). Houndsville, UK: Macmillan. Faustmann, H. (2017). The Struggle for Recognition and Political Rights of the Small Ethnic and Religious Minorities at the End of British Colonial Rule in Cyprus. In A. Yiangou & A. Heraclidou (Eds.), Cyprus from Colonialism to the Present: Visions and Realities: Essays in Honour of Robert Holland (pp. 88– 111). London: Routledge. Faustmann, H., & Solomou, E. (2011). Independent Cyprus, 1960–2010: Selected Readings from the Cyprus Review. Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press.

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Hadjipavlou, M. (2010). Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict. London: I. B. Tauris. Hadjipavlou, M., & Kanol, B. (2008). Cumulative Impact Case Study: The Impacts of Peace-Building WORK on the Cyprus Conflict. Cambridge, MA: CDA Collaborative Learning Projects. Katrivanou, V. (Director), & Azzouz, B. (Director) (2009). Women of Cyprus [motion picture]. Cyprus. Loomba, A. (2005). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Markides, K. (1977). The Rise and Fall of the Cyprus Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press. Morgan, T. (2011). Sweet and Bitter Island. London: I. B. Tauris. Richter, H. A. (2010). A Concise History of Cyprus 1878–2009. Mainz and Ruhpolding: Franz Phillipp Rutzen. Taki, Y., & Officer, D. (2013). The State We Are In. Nicosia, Cyprus: University of Nicosia Press. Todorova, M. (2007). I Don’t Know My Color, but I Do Know My Politics. In H. Aikau, K. Erickson, & J. Pierce (Eds.), Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy (pp. 197–210). Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Varnava, A. (2009). British Imperialism in Cyprus 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Vogel, B., & Richmond, O. (2013). Enabling Civil Society in Conflict Resolution, CORE Policy Brief, 2. Oslo: PRIO.

CHAPTER 2

Review of the Literature

Abstract This chapter presents a review of the scholarly literature that has examined the topic of women and war, specifically feminist approaches that examine gender-based violence and women’s roles in times of conflict, with a focus on women’s social movements and the ways in which they organize for peace. I extend the literature review by including women’s organizations in Cyprus, as there is little knowledge of the various ways in which women organize. Keywords Feminist epistemologies · Gender · Women violence and war · Militarism

Introduction: Women as Agents of Resistance In examining women in Cyprus and the ways in which they organize for peace, the book extends the scholarly literature on women’s social movements, where these particular women have been underrepresented and their oral histories have been invisible, in the only European country whose capital remains divided. It is important to examine such women’s groups and demonstrate the gendered nature of war and conflict by looking at how women confront war, the impact that war has on them due to their gender, and the diverse ways that they respond in reconciliation and peace processes. © The Author(s) 2021 S. Papastavrou, Women’s Organizations for Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45946-8_2

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It is critical to know about and understand women and women’s groups who work towards peace, because women are taking risks to pull their communities together during periods of conflict and post-conflict conditions. They do so by providing support and healing for women in the form of social services that may not be formally provided by the state; by working in solidarity with the “other side” and crossing ethnic, class and cultural lines; by working through alternative ways of peacebuilding; and by teaching each other to lobby for women’s participation in formal peace negotiations. This research, therefore, moves beyond simply discussing “[w]omen of many races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions around the world – in various geographic spaces, social, and culture contexts…[who] are always influenced by the construction of gender operating around their lives” (Mohanty et al. 2008, p. 6). Gender experiences differ across national boundaries and cultural categories; they also are in constant tension with each individual’s experience (Harding 1987, p. 8). The violence of war itself and its aftermath have typically been dismissed or brushed aside as merely the consequences of war. Yet, during conflict, women’s security and human rights are violated within a highly politicized international humanitarian community. In the past decade, feminist research has shown that women are targets of conflict due to their gender, and that violence is oftentimes used against women as a weapon of war. Feminist scholars Sjoberg and Via affirm that, Women are the majority of civilian casualties of war, before, during, and after the conflict. They are the primary targets of those who use rape and forced pregnancy as weapons of war. They make up the majority of refugees displaced from homes, farms, and sources of livelihood. Women also experience hardship and discrimination as members of state militaries…which often replicate and exaggerate social inequalities. (2010, p. 10)

In 2000, the United Nations, responded with Security Council Resolution 1325 to acknowledge the need for a gender perspective during conflict resolution and to lobby for the active participation of women in peace processes. However, the anti-war feminist literature has shown that women experience difficulties in being included in high-level negotiations for peace. This chapter will engage with a close reading of the literature and with experts in the field that ground the research on gender and conflict. A gendered analysis of conflict is useful in gaining insights into the ways

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nationalism, militarism, imperialism and displacement have impacted the lives of women in both conflict and post-conflict conditions. Feminist scholars of war have critiqued the roles that nationalism, militarism and imperialism play, as these are seen as part of the patriarchal formation and development of the nation state (Cockburn 1998, 2004, 2007; Hadjipavlou 2010; Vassiliadou 2002). Cockburn (2007) affirms that, Anti-militarist and anti-war feminism is by definition multi-dimensional, taking as its scope not just “body politics” but a far wider range of concerns. For a start it cannot fail to have a critique of capitalism, and new forms of imperialism and colonization, class exploitation and the thrust for global markets, since these are visibly implicated among the causes and motors of militarism and war. (p. 228)

Feminist scholars have focused on women as equally rightful actors in history by examining their roles as activists, leaders and participants in conflict-affected situations. I build on this body of scholarship on war and gender by examining Cyprus as a case study. Feminist scholars of Cyprus have intervened in the narration of gender and conflict by highlighting Cypriot women’s sense of home, the need for personal safety, the emotional and political prices of war and the personal tolls exacted by the violence, occupation and partition of the island (Katrivanou and Azzouz 2009). However, it is important to focus directly on the women in Cyprus, as their lives remain largely invisible in imperial and feminist writings. Feminist scholars of Cyprus like Maria Hadjipavlou (2010) note that women living in the divided island of Cyprus “need their own space in which to listen to each other and to affirm that knowledge is also produced through reflecting on our own experiences” (p. 8). The literature on Cyprus can thus expand on the knowledge around women’s experiences of conflict so that we may gain a broader understanding of how women are interconnected through both their differences and similarities, as they share their fear, anger, tragedy, resiliency and survival during times of conflict. It is this knowledge to which I hope to contribute with this research. In this chapter, I situate the ways in which the mechanisms of exclusion are at play in the Cyprus peace process, and also uncover the diversity, challenges and success stories of groups of multigenerational and pioneering women who have paved significant paths towards gender and peacebuilding. Who is the Cypriot woman? The Cypriot woman fits

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into neither Western European feminist concepts of gender, due to her multiple experiences of “colonial and anti-colonial struggle, living under conflict and post-conflict conditions, and Mediterranean historical experiences of sexualities and moralities” (Vassiliadou 2002, p. 474). The Cypriot woman lies on the cusp of Orientalism; she is the subject in which Europeans experience two worlds at the same time. Women’s groups in Cyprus thus negotiate between Europeanness and Non-Europeanness, and between positions of belonging and exclusion at the same time.

Cycles of Violence as Part of the Imperialist Project A critical lens can be used to understand current research on women and war and the masculinist endeavour of the “war system” as a cycle of violence that not only relies on and perpetuates the subordination of women, but is also interrelated with nationalism, militarism, imperialism and displacement. Feminist approaches share an understanding that these social processes affect women in profoundly distinctive ways, and as such, women seek possibilities for alternatives within the global system (Sjoberg and Via 2010). The role of women as reproducers of the nation in the form of mothers and wives is central to maintaining the imperialist project in which women’s bodies are signifiers for ethnic, national and religious difference and symbols of nationhood. Social structures like the state, family, law and education work to regulate women through social markers that are gender-specific (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989). Duality is part of the Westernized mode of thought that is necessary for the imperialist project. Western history and writings about the nonWestern world depict it as irrational, as needing to be civilized, and as the home of an “Other” that is a continual threat to the West. The individual enlightened with European knowledge is seen as scientific in nature, while the colonized, or the Native, is viewed as using imagination and intuition to understand the world. The challenges within feminist epistemology have been to recognize privilege, agency and positionality. Feminists like Butler and Spivak claim that women cannot bond under terms set by the dominant ideology of Western culture that assumes that all women have something in common just because they are women. In Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) observes that gender is a performance, and she challenges us to go beyond the

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notion that gender is culturally constructed; rather, she describes both sex and gender as constructions, embracing multiple ways of doing gender (through performance). Butler creates tension around the categories of sex and gender. However, it is Spivak (1988) who suggests that the issues of sexual difference and gender lie in the political actions of the subaltern subject.

How Nationalism and Gender Silenced Women in Cyprus Nationalism can be both enabling and constraining, as Jusdanis (2001) writes, “it has inspired people over the past two centuries to fight against the illegitimacy of foreign occupation” (p. 4). Simultaneously, nationalism has been responsible for ethnic cleansing and the fight for a dominant cultural identity. With the surge of Eurocentricism, “capitalism, colonialism, and new means of communication and transportation brought people closer together and mixed populations, endangering thereby their cultural existence” (Jusdanis 2001, p. 5). Nationalism arose through the need to become modern, and the newly independent nation states were in search of a national culture. In Cyprus, the formation of national identity was imperative in raising people’s resistance to the British and also in the way it empowered some groups but ended up marginalizing others. Anticolonial nationalism “is a struggle to represent, create, recover a culture and a selfhood that has been repressed and eroded during colonial rule” (Loomba 2005, p. 182). While creating the nation, women’s sexuality is exploited in ways that shame and often silence them. If women are silent, how do we understand their locations and role within the nation? Vassiliadou (1999) notes that the historical narrative of contemporary Cypriot history hardly mentions women, if they are even mentioned at all. Women are either identified as Greek or Turkish Cypriots and are rendered invisible as passive victims. Nationalism and war rely on gender in order to function, but its impact and meaning vary across different cultural, geographical and political contexts. Jusdanis’ (2001) research on nationalism defines it as a process. Nationalism is understood as a form of expression. As Jurdanis states, “Nationalism works through people’s hearts, nerves, and gut. It is an expression of culture through the body” (p. 31). I would add that this nationalist expression of culture is done through the female body. The nation-as-woman, for example, is a spatial embodiment of

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gendered feminine characteristics and as such the land upon which people depend for life. People must defend and protect the nation by defending the body/nation’s boundaries against invasion (Peterson 2001). Feminist research on gender and war describes nationalism as “male drama” in which women symbolically have the role of mother and icon of the community. In war, nationalism is used to create cohesion and mobilize the state’s agenda. It is important to note here that male-dominance involves a hierarchy between men. Masculinities are produced in relation to each other but also to women. Gender roles and responsibilities become hyper-actualized as masculine and feminine become governing principles and are idealized in practice. Women in conflict may thus become active participants in the nationalist project in order to maintain a sense of belonging to their communities. Nationalism propels women as they become “national actors”, affirming their roles as mothers, daughters and wives as culturally acceptable female conduct. Women fulfil their roles as caretakers of the nation as long as they never take part in the political leadership of the nation. Gender interests that may empower women as educators, activists, workers and even fighters in combat are taken up within the boundaries set by nationalist discourse. Nationalist projects demand attention because of the ways in which they construct and claim women as part of the nation. In times of war, gender politics and power relations are at the centre of nationalism as women are reduced to their reproductive functions and become symbols of the nation state. How is this politics of reproduction constructed? Patriarchy uses the concept of blood ties to promote bonding among men and group identity based on male-defined purpose (Peterson 2001). Men are expected to defend the honour of women and nationhood. For instance, Yuval-Davis (2011) suggests that “nationalism is used as an effort to shame or eliminate an enemy nation that generates particular motivations for rape, where militarized masculinities create cultures of violence” (p. 183). Anti-colonial movements organized by Cyprus’s elites, most of whom were educated in the West, drew on the colonizers’ established rules to challenge control although through the lens of a nationalized (indigenous) culture. For the Cypriot woman living in the in-between, she has had her ethnic identity constructed by and maintained from the outside (Greece, Turkey and Britain). In the exotic Orient and “civilized world” of Hellenism, the Western colonizer rules and lives in the comforts of

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home (Cypriot woman) with the benefits of being located conveniently between East and West.

Contemporary Understandings of War In this section, I will highlight the current debates of contemporary conflict and the global realities that involve women. Cartographies of conflict have changed due to a shift in cultural, economic and political processes. This has been observed in US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where interim governments have been sustained by foreign funding and supported predominately by the United States and its NATO allies. Butler’s (1990) concept is only one aspect of contemporary war: with the heavier militarization of nations around the world, the wars of today rely on women’s participation to function. For example, rape, accompanied by targeted violence and ethnic cleansing, is used as a weapon of war that relies on women. Forced pregnancy is used because it assumes that the child of the rape victim will only carry the genetic material or socalled cultural identity of the perpetrator. Subsequently, this will “cancel” out every aspect of the mother’s ethnic, religious and genetic identity (Allen 1996, p. 65). Such violence against women was not recognized as war crimes or crimes against humanity until the international community could no longer ignore women’s groups’ activism. Complicated by global concerns, the battlefield and home front are no longer distinguishable, as war occurs within sovereign states’ borders and not between them. The political and social repercussions of war manifest in highly gendered violence that physiologically and emotionally traumatizes civilians who have become central to war-making. In the last two decades, war has blurred spaces that were once deemed safe areas. Among the refugees and survivors of mass rape, even UN-protected areas are not safe. In 1995, the inadequacy of the UN troops is evident in the disaster of the UN “safe area” in Srebrenica. Serb soldiers were able to take over the area with ease, attacking and raping women as young as 15 years old and slaughtering thousands more. The peacekeepers did nothing but watch because they were ordered not to open fire, and so Srebrenica remains a tragic example of the myth of safety and protection (Polman 2003, p. 11). Soldiers, along with civilian women, children and men have become casualties of war. It has become a global responsibility to ensure all nations have the right to defend themselves. However, contemporary civil conflict or

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violence that erupts in one country does not necessarily mean another will invade for the sake of global responsibility. Polman (2003) suggests that in an effort to maintain international peace and security, the United Nations relies on its member states to approve of the participation of UN peacekeeping missions. The UN Security Council is the key body in maintaining international peace and security, as it launches peacekeeping missions, ensures the implementation of sanctions on a country, and legitimates international action. Over the past decade the world has witnessed some of the most horrifying consequences of war based on the lack of decision-making at UN headquarters. UN peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda and Bosnia demonstrated that Security Council Resolutions take on a different life with unimagined consequences on the ground (Polman 2003). The Security Council’s inability to agree on the use of force and the capacity of the troops they send into conflict zones have made clear how the world’s most powerful countries manipulate the UN to fulfil their own national interests. Feminist researchers Meintjes et al. (2001) observe that human rights are defined in a narrow sense of civil and political liberties, but neglect economic and social rights. Whether in times of military dictatorship or democracy, patriarchal power is implemented through the rhetoric of equality and rights, despite an emphasis on women’s human rights (Meintjes et al. 2001). Human rights have not always included women (Papastavrou 2011), and it is in this instance that we must be cautious in the way women’s rights are understood and implemented during times of war and peace. United Nations fieldwork shows women’s roles in conflict are insignificant to that of men, yet feminist research has identified the diverse ways women experience war. Women’s participation in conflict ranges from their fulfilment of the role of refugee or internally displaced persons to that of provider and combatant. Women may have supplementary military roles on a voluntary basis or because they have been coerced by members of their community.

Gender-Based Violence and Warfare Intersecting different forms of oppression based on race, economic class or experiences of colonialism with sexism and violence are important in that it allows a comprehension of how women mediate between different histories and an understanding of the personal. Cultural codes and norms

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of power, dominance and sexuality carried out within a patriarchal system have a direct connection to violence against women. Social constructions of masculinity in armies play a key role in how violence manifests itself. For example, during war, femininity is symbolized by the land, the nation and the community. Since any gendered female became nothing more than an object stripped of genetic material, masculinity became the ultimate value in this regulated exchange, as the male was the one who could give and take genetic or cultural identity and, more significantly, life. Women’s bodies have been and continue to be the war zone, where men use acts of rape and other forms of violence as forms of aggression towards other men (Nikolic-Ristanovic 2000, p. 63). It is important to address that such gendered violence is not limited to armed “enemy” forces. Official bodies, such as United Nations peacekeeping soldiers or international aid workers, have also engaged in such forms of violence against women when social control has broken down in the conflict area. Witnesses during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1991–2001 identified offending UN soldiers as Canadian, New Zealander, French and Ukrainian (Allen 1996, p. 76). Sexual abuse cases against Canadian UN soldiers in Haiti in 2013 were brought to the surface. The cases never went to trial and the soldiers were granted immunity because, under UN rules, civilian staff—including officers— are immune from criminal prosecution in the country where the alleged offence occurred. Once back in Canada, they cannot be charged for a crime committed abroad. United Nations Protection Forces were sent to the Balkans in 1993 to protect civilians and to participate in the demilitarization of designated areas, but they took part in the sexual abuse of female detainees (Nikolic-Ristanovic 2000). Women have become targets because the military itself has served as a symbolic celebration of manhood. Gendered violence by UN Peacekeepers challenges the idea that only the “natives” of the conflict participate in such violence. Peacekeeping soldiers who have committed gender-based crimes have been excused by nation states as merely responding to or in reaction of the turbulent circumstances that occur in the war zone. Women’s organizations, feminist researchers and peace activists have spent the past two decades bringing to light the violations women have faced from both humanitarian community, which is supposed to protect them, and military regimes. A breakthrough on the international stage came on 24 June 2013, when the United Nations Security Council

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adopted Resolution 2106, recognizing the long-term efforts towards women’s political, social and economic empowerment, gender equality in peacetime and the prevention of violence against women in armed conflict/post-conflict. Sections 14 and 15 of Resolution 2106 call for predeployment mission training on gender-based violence for Peacekeeping troops and police and to put in place a zero-tolerance policy on sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children by all UN personnel as per United Nations Security Council Resolution, 2013. Additionally, the Security Council urges member states to ensure full accountability to address gender-based violence, including prosecuting their troops. The Security Council called on countries to increase the number of women recruited and deployed in peace operations as part of its resolution in 2016. Recognizing that UN personnel, such as peacekeepers and aid workers, have been responsible for violating women in conflict and post-conflict situations is a step forward, and it acknowledges that women’s organizations and women survivors of gender-based violence in war have a long road of activism ahead. What remains to be seen is how UN personnel and nation states will be made accountable and, in what capacity they will be brought to justice should such violations of human rights occur. Even though the international community is now working closely with nation states to incorporate a more gender-inclusive approach to prevent gender-based violence and promote peacebuilding, it is activist work on the ground among diverse local women’s groups that has brought gender relations of war and violence to the forefront of public awareness in countries affected by conflict. Though Resolution 2106 underlines the important roles that civil society organizations, including women’s groups and networks, play in enhancing community-level protection against gender-based violence and in supporting survivors in conflict and postconflict, the support and assistance of local women’s organizations need to be the foundation of the mandate in order to successfully prosecute perpetrators of gender-based violence. It is important to highlight how local grassroots women’s organizations play a critical role in activism during times of conflict. Some examples of women’s consciousness-raising groups from Serbia reflect political activity by challenging ethnic hatred and nationalist agendas that resulted from conflict in the region. Women in Black Belgrade, founded in 1991, has been active within the Belgrade women’s movement through peace initiatives that began during the war in the former

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Yugoslavia. The group has also established non-governmental organizations and social justice programs that address human rights violations in the region. By opposing the war, as well as by addressing gendered violence and ethnic nationalism, Women in Black represents the great effort of building tolerance and reconciliation. Another example is the initiatives of women’s activists groups in South Sudan under the New Sudan Women’s Federation (NSWF), established in 1995. The aim of this organization was to bring together women’s associations in South Sudan in order to improve the status of women in the region since the beginning of the conflict in the early eighties. The need to bring together Sudanese women’s organizations has never been greater, as women in the region have been displaced and subjected to gender-specific violence as well as other human rights abuses. The aforementioned groups identified the way violence was legitimized through religion and they pointed out traditional laws that condoned violence against women in wartime. The importance of being included in decision-making and peacebuilding processes in a post-conflict Sudan will be the foundation for developing a campaign against sexual assault as a weapon of war. Women’s organizations across Sudan and other parts of East Africa have brought their own experiences of gender-specific violence and war to these public awareness campaigns. In spite of religious or ethnic differences, these women provided a common voice that is carving out a new phase in stopping gender-based violence against women and young girls. Transnational feminist activists and their counterparts have provided a diverse framework of feminisms that combine women’s everyday lived experiences and theories. They have brought the reality of violence against women into public consciousness and have provided a framework for studying violence against women in conflict. In Cyprus, intimate partner violence and domestic abuse is both a prevalent and underreported issue. In the south of the island, domestic laws and state legislation lack harassment protection unless physical harm is evident. Additionally, the issue of the severity of human trafficking and the exploitation of migrant workers who work legally in the south and then “illegally” in the north rarely makes front-page news. According to women’s activists on the ground, one in five women in Cyprus over the age of 15 has been the victims of physical or sexual violence at the hands of a partner. In 2014, the NGO SPAVO (Association for the Prevention and Handling of Violence in the Family) reported 812 incidents of domestic violence against women, including over 300 new cases of abuse

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in the south alone. The cases of violence that are actually being reported are overwhelming while the cases of violence, whether psychological, emotional or physical, that go unreported remain unsettling. At conferences, roundtable discussions and presentations, MIGS and HAD have broken the taboo of speaking in the public sphere about gender-based violence, specifically violence against women. During the 2000 amendment of the domestic violence law, women in parliament lobbied for its success. While women’s groups were successful, systematically there is a backward trend. A gender action plan that addresses UNSCR 1325, highlighting the necessity to include women in peace negotiations, is not incorporated, according to Pavlou (March 2014). The resolution is significant not only for recognizing the disproportionate and gender-specific impact of conflict on women and girls in the prevention and resolution of conflicts. The adoption of such a policy is testament to the recognition of gender inequities and the contributions of women around the world. Armed conflicts, however, continue, and women remain disproportionately affected during wartime. The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000 affirmed that women can and should be involved in peacemaking. Women’s rights activism has been challenging in an otherwise restrictive environment, and is highlighted by the lack of funding, as well as a degree of apathy between policy and citizens.

Reconciliation and Resolution 1325 Women across borders of nation states continue to face the effects of conflict well after war has ended. Within the current research on women and war, a feminist analysis of reconciliation is a starting point in understanding the complexity of how those who lived through conflict have survived. Reconciliation is part of the dialogue in the literature on contemporary conflict and is observed as the transition from war to peace in the humanitarian community and at the international level. In contemporary warfare, conflict resolution articulates the end of direct violence making way for peacebuilding. Community healing and peacebuilding expert, Anne Goodman, suggests that current wars are civil-based, which means that after direct violence stops, the groups need to find ways to live together (Goodman 2009). Reconciliation is a fragmentary process and a journey that happens over a period of time and remains ongoing. After the violence has ended and the peace resolutions or agreements are signed,

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lasting peace is not necessarily guaranteed. Such peace relations may actually recreate new conflict in the future. The desperation and human suffering felt in war and post-war conditions makes the possibility for peace, forgiveness and healing challenging. Goodman (2009) calls for the reconciliation process to involve ecological, social, personal, psychological and spiritual healing and not solely based at the political level. Ethiopian peacebuilding practitioner, Hizkias Assefa, reminds us that reconciliation implies “walking together” and the “coming together” of those who have been divided and are now trying to rebuild relationships (Goodman 2009). The need for transitional justice in post-conflict environments is essential to sustain resolution among the different aspects of the complex interrelationships that exist in contemporary war. Women’s complex and multifaceted experiences in war differ, but so do their connections which determine their position in the aftermath (Meintjes et al. 2001). The evolution of contemporary warfare has made women’s experiences in conflict different from those of men, both as agents and victims. In the Cyprus context, Cypriot women from diverse backgrounds are still missing from the official table and the closed-door policy discussions around a negotiated agreement. Cyprus’ limited number of Cypriot women in negotiations dismisses gender equality and omits the diversity and inclusive voices of women from the building of the nation state. While we know that when women have been included in peace negotiations, their contribution and perspective have often ensured that peace accords address demands for gender equality in new constitutional, judicial and electoral structures. GAT, who specifically focused on the 1325 agenda, highlighted other international interventions when lobbying for a gender perspective in the peace negotiations. The negotiating teams from both the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot sides do not adequately understand the impact of including a gender perspective in formal discussions and possible solutions to the Cyprus Problem. However, this resolution is of paramount importance and there is a need to implement 1325. For the increased practical implementation of UNSCR 1325, the Security Council adopted a series of more relevant resolutions, such as 1820, 1888 and 1890. Women who work for peace at the community level rarely reach national or international negotiating tables (Cockburn 2007). Instead, they make practical efforts at reconciliation and peacemaking by assisting communities in addressing concerns and aspirations. Women’s peacebuilding groups, for example, have used the concept of feminist ritual

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to engage in a dialogue about the oppression they face as women in their communities as well as proactive solutions to moving forward. Both formal and informal rituals are important in mediating and implementing ideas for the journey towards reconciliation. Giles (2003) warns that any sort of conflict resolution, reconciliation and prevention cannot begin without an understanding of the gendered politics that perpetuates violence. The continuity of gender subordination is evident in the way women must constantly negotiate their place within the contemporary realm of war structured by heterosexual, masculinized values. For instance, humanitarian assistance agencies often do not address women’s cultural and social roles or take into consideration the customary divisions of labour of different cultures when they plan a refugee camp. In a refugee camp, the daily tasks of living might be organized in a way that women may find humiliating if they are forced to perform tasks that are not accepted in their cultures (Giles 2003). Women’s organizations must remain active in the struggle for peace and demand room in negotiations to help shape new government frameworks and to address the socioeconomic issues that arise due to war. When making comparisons across regions of conflict, the idea of place, safe or otherwise, is highlighted as a tool to conceptualize the ways in which women negotiate exclusion. In Cyprus, women’s organizations in this book have been paramount in creating awareness and understanding that women in fact are not well represented at high-level politics, economics or at the peace talks, and there is little understanding of gender issues beyond women’s participation within Cypriot civil society. This is partly due to the fact that the Cyprus Problem has become so ingrained into the population’s psyche that a possible way out of this mentality requires a paradigm shift.

Militarism Nationalism and militarization have become normalized parts of human life. They are pervasive parts of the political operations of nation states and in the daily life of people around the world. Militarism is observed as being broader than conflict. As a system comprised of institutions, practices, values and cultures, it is a set of activities outside of “war proper” that moves into social and political life and works by blurring distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian (Sjoberg and Via 2010). In the gendered process of militarization, men must prove that they

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are “men”. The institution functions in a complex militarized-industrial system that requires men to be willing to kill and die on behalf of, and to prove their loyalty to, the state. Sjoberg and Via (2010) explain, “militarization is gendered in its aim (competitive power), its means (the military industrial complex), its language (of strength and domination), and its impacts (which disproportionately and negatively affect women)” (p. 7). The service of being in the military offers proof of nationhood, manhood and citizenship. Militaries become hyper-masculine spaces that engage in the creation of male qualities such as physicality, male bonding, violence, sacrifice and domination. Though hyper-masculinity is valued in such spaces, the military also relies on the subordination of masculinities in order to function. The increased reliance on advanced technology and women in the military has created conflicting expectations of femininity, masculinity and sexuality (Peterson 2001). For example, when the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison were exposed in late 2003, the West was shocked that the abuse and sexualized torture of detainees was also conducted by white American female soldiers alongside their male counterparts. Women have been historically cast in the role of victim and pacifist, specifically with no power. In the case of Abu Ghraib, women in the US military contradicted their femininity in taking on a masculine role that supported military objectives (Peterson 2001). While the atrocities were identified as masculine in nature, which included acts of aggression, control, power and sexual access, the victims of these war crimes were violently objectified and feminized. The international community has lobbied for the increase of women in the military and police deployed in conflict and post-conflict areas in the hopes that this will build peace and protect human rights. Those soldiers gendered female must assimilate into the institutions that are founded on the assertion of cultural superiority and participate in torture to gain information and/or to humiliate the feminized “Other” and to display manhood. Even the most progressive armies differentiate power relations between men and women despite women being formally incorporated into the military. It is not enough to just add women in and stir, as it is clear that gender functions as a power relation that creates other power dynamics. According to Peterson (2001), men are forced to comply with a masculine construction of the good, obedient soldier while at the same time sustaining political and military power.

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Militarism becomes embedded into the society itself so that all investments, training and preparation lead to the peak experience known as war. Like a well-oiled machine, militarization does the work of making racialized, masculinized, sexuality, class and ability dynamics visible. Subsequently, it does this so well that when “official” war commentaries come out, they gain traction and legitimate the need for war (Peterson 2001). The war narrative is dependent on an “us” versus “them” mindset in order to function. This othering has historically been part of nationalist, colonial and imperial projects, because it has allowed the creation of ideologies that promote Western superiority and make contemporary military interventions justifiable. While nationalist efforts seek to shame or eliminate the enemy, generating motives of genocide or ethnic cleansing, militarized masculinities create cultures of violence. A patriarchal web of violence makes militaristic cultures possible and maintains the dynamics of war-making in contemporary conflicts. In understanding war and militarism from a gendered lens, “we find not just vestiges of gender discrimination but pervasive feminization on the basis of gender, race, class, nationality, religion, and ‘otherings’ in global politics” (Sjoberg and Via 2010, p. 238). Militarization reinforces orientalist assumptions in its creation of the other, normalizes the military’s need and privileges heternormative masculine world order. Militarism perpetuates a cycle of violence in organizing and making war, while the narrative of conflict through the mass media justifies the need for war. Resuscitating the narratives of those who are affected by violent conflict is necessary for unravelling the realities of war. The lack of a solution to the Cyprus Problem maintains and solidifies a very high militarization of the island, with Turkish and Turkish Cypriot military troops securing the north, and Greek, Greek Cypriot troops guarding the south. Moreover, British troops are stationed in the two sovereign military bases, and the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus has been serving on the island since 1964 in one of the longest UN missions (Varnava 2012; Faustmann and Varnava 2009). For Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot men, military service is mandatory; young men must spend one year in the army and are indoctrinated with either Greek or Turkish nationalist discourses. Furthermore, the division of the island has largely become normalized within Western political and international relations discourse. The military has been normalized with barbed-wire fences, abandoned fields because of landmines, UN Peacekeepers, debilitated homes and shops on the Green Line and the

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former colonial government buildings that are juxtaposed with trendy coffee house franchises, international fast-food restaurants (in the south) mixed with traditional Greek and Cypriot restaurants. In the north there are similar versions of the same international chains. Women and men are dressed in the latest European and Western clothing by elite fashion houses, amplifying the “false” notion that Cyprus is indeed in peacetime. “One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear; men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself” (Cockburn 2004, p. 131). We see this appear time and time again as international bodies on the island claim to support Cypriot women’s participation in the formal peace negotiations, but actually undermine women’s capacity by affirming that a white, heteronormative, patriarchal male body is necessary to “civilize” Cypriot women’s understanding, role and participation in their own right within the Cyprus Problem discourse and in the maintenance of an intensively militarized state. The Case for Cyprus This section will discuss the case of Cyprus to illustrate and extend the current literature on gender and war. There is no abrupt cut-off line between war and post-war. Despite the end of armed conflict, survivors are traumatized and the trauma is gendered. Those displaced in armed conflict are forced to resettle in distant countries and learn new languages and earn new livelihoods. They have painfully evolved—negotiating belonging to the host country, to the diaspora, and to a new distant home. However, for those who stay behind in a conflict that has not been resolved, the trauma remains. For post-conflict societies, moving forward depends on overcoming the fears, trauma and atrocities of war. The international security radar has forgotten the case of the Republic of Cyprus as it favours more “hot” areas where violence has erupted, and it engages in wars against terrorism and fundamentalism, promotes freedom from dictatorship and supports transitioning societies into Western neoliberal capitalist democracies. The legacy of conflict-related violence has left Cyprus little access to justice, as most cases of human rights violations against the government of Turkey are pending in the European Court of Human Rights. Education systems in the north and south continue to promote accounts

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of the past that perpetuate separation, victimhood and blame on the “Other”. Gender in Cyprus has been officially interpreted by the state as viewing women as dependent on men. For example, women refugees who were displaced due to the 1974 invasion have differential and limited access to resources due to a patriarchal framework (Hadjipavlou 2010). Women in Cyprus experienced displacement and endured violations and gender-based violence, yet they have not been officially recognized as the mainstream actors in the narrative of the war. The hegemonic male discourse of the Cyprus Problem has made it difficult for women’s voices to be heard (Agathangelou 2000, 2002, 2003; Cockburn 2004; Hadjipavlou 2010). An ethno-nationalist culture, maintained through militarism and imperialism, has avoided the gendered issues that affect both men and women on the island. Tegiye Birey, former member of the Gender Advisory Team, explains why the issue of violence against women is a critical factor to the consequences of war trauma: We have the Turkish settlers in the north and immigrants in the south and the illusion of a developed country with no problems. Data on violence against women is not hard to trace and this puts activist in a tough position. We know a lot of women who were raped and we know it wasn’t just an intercommunal issue. Since people are afraid of talking we see this veil of silence due to trauma of war. Peacebuilding efforts are very hard. After 40 plus years, a lot of people lost hope. They said whatever we say, whatever we do they will solve it. The idea is that we will wake up one day and we won‘t even notice. There is a victim psychology… It makes it quite hard because we didn’t have the conflict yesterday; it is becoming normal now and people are sick of this issue. This is how they feel, but it has this side you cannot talk about gender, violence against women, LGBT issues. They say when the problem will be solved and we [Turkish Cypriots] will be in the EU (European Union) and the EU will take care of the rest for us [Cypriots]. (T. Birye, interview March 2014)

The distribution of power across the ethnic divide prioritizes Greek and Turkish Cypriot men. The image of an ideal citizen in Cyprus is male who belongs to a majority ethnicity and is the protector of the nation: able-bodied, hyper-masculine, heterosexual and combat-ready. Women’s rights on both sides of the island must include the needs of women refugees, migrant workers and victims of human trafficking in order for Resolution 1325 to be implemented through all federal levels

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of legislation (Hadjipavlou 2010). It is important to recognize that women’s experiences are not homogenous and to address the complex intersections of age, class, ability, sexuality and ethnicity in order to meet the needs of these diverse women’s groups. The instability of the current economic climate has exacerbated social tensions and fuelled racist/sexist violence. In 2012, the economy of the Republic of Cyprus was in recession, and the neoliberal economic policies, which included banks’ depositors having to hand over their assets to help stabilize the banks and requirements of the troika,1 have had gender implications as they have disadvantaged women who have been pushed into part-time work or have lost their jobs all together. Women’s unemployment during the crisis and cuts to social benefits further widened the gender gap. In foregrounding inclusion in dealing with conflict between and within, an effort must be made to advance gender equality practice across the whole island by incorporating women’s perspectives and voices in peace negotiations that goes beyond the European Union, United Nations, and the major ethnic groups. Cypriot women, as agents of resistance, offer a way of understanding women and war by complicating the notion of unity among women and addressing the effects of nationalism, militarism and imperialism on women’s lives. Can academics find ways of presenting theories that are useful to activists and survivors of war? Women’s stories of survival and loss matter, civilian bodies in war matter, and it is deeply embedded within the narrative of how women’s dialogue is questioning “the power systems of the economic, the ethno-national, and the sex/gender power – all three intersect and promote inequality and are sustained by coercion and violence” (Hadjipavlou and Mertan 2010, p. 265). Anti-war feminist activists have brought the reality of gender and war to the forefront by providing a framework based on principles for rebuilding women’s lives. Furthermore, such local and international exchanges prove to have ground-breaking results in post-conflict reconciliation and safe refugee return. What the international community can do is to let women in conflict and post-conflict situations know that their suffering will not be allowed to happen again; that we will educate ourselves and others, and let them know that they are not alone. Women who have faced such atrocities of war must continue to be allowed to tell their own stories, from 1 The composition of an international body consisting of the European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank.

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their own perspectives, in their own words, as they begin to put together the pieces of a life that will never be the same back together. The intention of this chapter has been to bring awareness to the highly politicized world of international affairs and to indicate further the patriarchal structures embedded within an international community that boasts equal opportunity and gender justice. The critical view of the anti-war feminist literature has delved into the experienced reality of violence against women and provided a framework for work on women in places and times of armed conflict. The experiences of my world at any moment in Cyprus and at UN Headquarters have resulted from my own position in class, race, culture and gender. As feminist Sandra Harding (1987) suggests, “If we want to understand how our daily experience arrives in the forms it does, it makes sense to examine critically the sources of social power” (p. 9). While engaging in nationalism, militarism, imperialism and displacement as social processes that impact the way in which conflict is understood and manifested it is important to address the empowerment of women, and not lose sight of the human rights violations that women experience in a war which continue to be recognized as unfortunate circumstances of the conflicts themselves.

References Agathangelou, A. M. (2000). Nationalist Narratives and (Dis)appearing Women: State-Sanctioned Sexual Violence. Canadian Woman Studies, 19(4), 12–21. Agathangelou, A. M. (2002). Globalization and Radical Feminist Pedagogy: Forging Trans-Border Solidarities Through Student Activism. In N. Naples & K. Bojar (Eds.), Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies from the Field (pp. 138–153). New York: Routledge. Agathangelou, A. M. (2003). Envisioning a Feminist Global Society: Cypriot Women, Civil Society and Social Change. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5(2), 290–299. Allen, B. (1996). Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Anthias, F., & Yuval-Davis, N. (Eds.). (1989). Woman-Nation-State. London: Macmillan. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cockburn, C. (1998). The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict. London: Zed Books.

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Cockburn, C. (2004). The Line: Women, Partition, and the Gender Order in Cyprus. London: Zed Books. Cockburn, C. (2007). From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism, and Feminist Analysis. London: Zed Books. Faustmann, H., & Varnava, A. (2009). Reunifying Cyprus the Annan Plan and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris. Giles, W. (2003). Feminist Exchanges and Comparative Perspectives Across Conflict Zones. In W. Giles, M. De Alwis, E. Klein, & N. Silva (Eds.), Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War-zones (pp. 1–14). Toronto: Between the Lines. Goodman, A. (2009). Walking Together, Talking Together: The Praxis of Reconciliation. The Mediator, 18(2). Hadjipavlou, M. (2010). Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict. London: I.B. Tauris. Hadjipavlou, M., & Mertan, B. (2010). Cypriot Feminism: An Opportunity to Challenge Gender and Inequalities and Promote Women’s Rights and a Different Voice. The Cyprus Review, 22(2), 247–268. Harding, S. (1987). Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jusdanis, G. (2001). The Necessary Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Katrivanou, V., & Azzouz, B. (Directors). (2009). Women of Cyprus [motion picture]. Cyprus. Loomba, A. (2005). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Meintjes, S., Pillary, A., & Turshen, M. (2001). There Is No Aftermath for Women. In S. Meintjes, A. Pillary, & M. Turshen (Eds.), The Aftermath: Women in Post-conflict Transformation (pp. 3–18). London: Zed Books. Mohanty, C. T., Riley, R. L., & Pratt, M. B. (2008). Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism. London: Zed Books. Nikolic-Ristanovic, V. (2000). Women, Violence and Wartime: Victimzation of Refugees in the Balkans. Budapest: Central European University Press. Papastavrou, S. (2011). Refugee Women, Violence, and War: A Return to Transnational Feminist Praxis. Minerva Journal of Women and War, 4(2), 6–23. Peterson, N. J. (2001). Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Polman, L. (2003). We Did Nothing: Why the Truth Doesn’t Always Come Out When the UN Goes In. London: Penguin Books. Sjoberg, L., & Via, S. (2010). Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspectives. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

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Spivak, G. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–316). Urbana: University of Illinois. Varnava, A. (2012). British Military Intelligence in Cyprus During the Great War. War in History, 19(3), 353–378. Vassiliadou, M. (1999). A Struggle for Independence: Attitudes and Practices of the Women of Cyprus. Nicosia, Cyprus: University of Nicosia Press. Vassiliadou, M. (2002). Questioning Nationalism: The Patriarchal and National Struggles of Cypriot Women within a European Context. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 9(4), 459–482. Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage.

CHAPTER 3

Theoretical Framework

Abstract The chapter provides a genealogy of women’s organizations in peace negotiations in Cyprus. A review of the existing discursive framing on women’s activism provides a basis for examining the non-formal ways in which women’s organizations have mobilized through cultural production, traditional order and the use of international resolutions on women, peace and security. Keywords Agency · Nationalism · Decolonization · Transnational feminism

In this chapter, I map out the case of women’s groups organizing for peace in a divided Cyprus, within the multi-level perspectives of power relations that include race, gender, ethnicity and religion. I engage in a critical analysis of the issues surrounding women and war. Cypriot women have been left out of the historical narrative that is based on the patriarchal assumptions of war, and as such, I argue that the omission of women’s participation in peacebuilding, vis à vis formal peace negotiations, and the subsequent ignorance of women’s rights on the island are an act of gender-based violence. This book sheds light on the long-term consequence of the Cyprus conflict, referred to by the international community as the Cyprus

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Problem (Faustmann 2001, 2017; Faustmann and Varnava 2009; Faustmann and Solomou 2011), in which all issues, including gender equality, are relegated to a post-solution time. The Cyprus Problem is based “on the assumption that a Eurocentric heterosexual ‘order’ is an underpinning for creating the nation” (Riley et al. 2008, p. 3). I begin with discussing gender-based violence during conflict to understand the humanitarian and international institutions and actors in their approach to gender and women’s rights in times of conflict. In order to address the multi-level perspectives of power relations, I use transnational feminist theory as a lens to observe the different threads that bind women together—the sense of home, the importance of land, the need for personal safety, the emotional and political price of war and the personal tolls exacted by occupation, partition and atrocities. I do so by first discussing how colonialism and decolonization are known, defined and understood. With these particular understandings, I then go on to integrate a transnational feminist analysis offered by Agathangelou (2000), (2002), (2003), (2006), Cockburn (2004), Hadjipavlou (2004), and Demetriou (2007) to show how a feminist analysis can go beyond patriarchy and gender, to be applied to causes of war, such as capitalism, economic exploitation and global markets. Such imperialist notions, which are systemically embedded in mainstream feminist theory, remain contested and problematic through the homogenization of non-Western women. Razack (2000) and Mohanty (2003) try to break through the site of such discursive politics in which raced and gendered knowledge is produced, organized and regulated. This theoretical framework is grounded in this research and analysis by asking how have women organized for peace and identified their organizing successes and challenges. More specifically, in identifying their key issues and organizing strategies, the issues relevant to Cypriot women in the post-conflict environment, who have experienced trauma and violence due to war, require a practice and theory that go beyond Western universal applicability. Hadjipavlou (2010) notes that women from a divided island “need their own space in which to listen to each other and to affirm that knowledge is also produced through reflecting on our own experiences” (p. 8). To do so, I extend Hadjipavlou’s (2010) analysis to explore historical records and case studies of women’s groups in Cyprus that have brought alternative approaches to the traditional Western concepts of women, violence and war. Agathangelou and Killian (2002) suggest that postcolonial traumas played a role in which “gender,

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sexuality, class, race and (re)production were explicit factors in the mode of violence in Cyprus during and after the many years of conflict both covert and overt since 1960” (p. 22).

Decolonization and the Cypriot Woman During the course of the island’s history, the female body became the site of discovery, rape and conquest (Loomba 2005). The Cypriot woman’s body is a physical and symbolic space, where the creation of the nation is justified and defended. In her work on women and war, Giles (2003) argues: The public/private distinctions between battlefield and home, soldier and civilian, state security and human security have broken down. Feminist analyses of conflict elucidate the intimate connections between war, political economy, nationalism, and human displacement and their various impacts across scale. The body, household, nation state, and economy all represent the site at which violence can be invoked against people in highly gendered ways. (p. 3)

The role of Cypriot women as reproducers of the nation, in the form of mothers and wives, is central in the maintenance of the colonial project. Social structures, like the state, family, law and education, regulate women through social markers that are gender-specific. Cypriot women face multiple layers of oppression by a superior (men) and foreigner, or white and Westerner (Vassiliadou 2002). Colonial practices and the rhetoric of war construct Cypriot women’s inadequacy and inferiority that precluded women’s invisibility at the negotiating table. The process of decolonization can be defined as an attempt of the previously colonized to reflectively work out a historical relation with the former colonizer, culturally, politically and economically (Chen 2010). Fanon (1999) suggests that the colonial world is a world cut into two sides: the Western/European and the native. He further argues that the “colonial world, its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonized society will be reorganized” (Fanon 1999, p. 26). For Fanon, the process of decolonization as a response to colonialism is part of the struggle that the colonized face to become free. He advocates that “[d]ecolonization unifies that people

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by the radical decision to remove from [it] heterogeneity, and by unifying it on a national, sometimes a racial bias” (ibid., p. 30). Three major themes are apparent in the decolonization process that we can observe in the geocolonial historical Cypriot narrative (Chen 2010). These include nationalism, brought forward during anti-colonialist movements; nativism, or revitalization of culture, within the categories created by the colonizers; and civilizationism, or the struggle for political/cultural justice (ibid.). The making and remaking of Cypriot culture and national identity occurred during foreign rule and throughout most of the island’s history. This concept is an important one in addressing the complexities of nationalism. Here, the use of nationalism is informed by Jusdanis’ (2001) research, in which he defines it as a process and understands it as a form of expression. In this work he writes, “Nationalism works through people’s hearts, nerves, and gut. It is an expression of culture through the body” (p. 31). It is necessary to address the island’s long road from imperialism to colonialism and the conditions at play that have kept women on the margins. Meintjes et al. (2001) address a key issue that is missing from the way women are understood (in both war and peace). It is important to recognize that women are involved in a variety of ways in “peacemaking”, whether it is on the frontline as soldiers or as part of anti-nationalist movements or bicommunal organizations. The international community cannot assign women to the role of peacemaker, as this in itself is problematic and keeps women “in the single dimension of her sex” (ibid.). Indeed, Cypriot women have yet to be employed as part of elevated team discussions regarding the future of the island. As a result, the pomposity of war diction creates a subservience which has excluded women from any negotiating table in the post-conflict period. Meintjes et al. (2001) assert that women’s diverse experiences of war, such as displacement, loss of home and family, as well as genderbased violence, does not end once the conflict has ended. In fact, women become more vulnerable in post-conflict conditions. In the case of Cyprus, patriarchal gender relations remain deeply embedded in the fabric of the society. In that moment from conflict to peacetime “the rhetoric of equality and equal rights tends to mask the reconstruction of patriarchal power despite recent emphasis on women’s human rights” (ibid., p. 4). The United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 of 2000 stated that women can and should be involved in peacemaking, however, Cypriot women have not been represented at the formal peace

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negotiating table, despite the fact that the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission is headed by female and feminist leadership. Practices of reconciliation and peacemaking are being done on the ground as women’s groups address fears, distrust and hopes through weekly meetings and when they visit the homes they lost in the war. An understanding of colonialism, anti-colonial nationalism and the politics of nation-building is necessary as they are part of the historical narrative. According to Loomba (2005), colonialism is defined as the conquest and control of other people’s land and resources. Anti-colonial nationalism “is a struggle to represent, create, recover a culture and a selfhood that has been repressed and eroded during colonial rule” (ibid., p. 182). Nationalism can both enable and constrain, as Jusdanis (2001) writes, “[I]t has inspired people over the past two centuries to fight against the illegitimacy of foreign occupation” (p. 4). Simultaneously nationalism has been responsible for ethnic cleansing and the fight for a dominant cultural identity. With the surge of Eurocentricism, “capitalism, colonialism, and new means of communication and transportation brought people closer together and mixed populations, endangering thereby their cultural existence” (Jusdanis 2001, p. 5). The formally colonized wanted to preserve their traditional identities within a new national culture (Jusdanis 2001). To recount some points made earlier, national identity can empower some groups but marginalize others. In the case of Cyprus, Greek national identity disregarded those who identified themselves as Turkish or as other minorities living among the two major ethnic groups. Nationalism can rally anti-colonial movements and solidify cultural identity, and in doing so excludes other groups. The making and remaking of Cyprus culture and national identity occurred during foreign rule and throughout most of the island’s history.

A Transnational Feminist Praxis A transnational feminist viewpoint constructs a feminist political mobilization that recognizes the contributions of each feminism without using historical “waves” and identifying women’s condition beyond the exclusive male preserve of a sovereign nation state (Hadjipavlou 2010). Transnational feminism considers the complex intersections of race, sex, ethnicity, class and sexuality in the lives of women of colour, “thirdworld” women and women in conflict/post-conflict areas. Transnational feminism is a helpful framework for this book because it addresses

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the exploitation of women in post-conflict conditions who live in a country that is built upon the legacy of colonialism, militarism, sexism, homophobia and sex slavery. The women’s groups in this book address patriarchal structures but also the resistance to occupation that requires a multiple feminist lens to address the discrimination of women, persons in the LGBT community and migrant workers. Each woman in my research has been on a personal journey of pain due to the consequences of war, and as such a transnational feminist perspective allows room to interpret personal trauma, and to interpret reconciliation and peacemaking. The vital importance of incorporating such experiential politics is in forming resistance to women’s oppression (Razack 2000, p. 40). Transnational feminist theory is imperative for understanding the various ways women are exposed to violence. Since the issue spans the globe, it cannot be sufficiently analysed under a mainstream feminist perspective that does not sufficiently incorporate nor revere cultural differences among women, especially since women’s experiences are not universal. The primarily white, middle-class feminists of the women’s movement claimed that the cause of women’s inequality to men was based on gender. Transnational feminists argue that one must begin by addressing the ethnocentric assumptions that are made by Western feminists. According to transnational feminists, white, Western feminists assume their own middle-class cultures as the norm, and they assume their experiences have universal applicability (Mohanty 2003, p. 18). In order to develop political solidarity between feminists, activists emphasize that women cannot bond on terms set by the dominant ideology of Western culture. Mohanty’s intention here is to cut through the boundaries of Western feminist theory by challenging it and also by drawing attention to inclusive visions of feminism that suggest a way of understanding race, class, gender, nation, sexuality and colonialism in terms of social, spatial and symbolic distance (Mohanty 2003, p. 58). Reflections of the political landscape on forms of resistance acts as a point for challenging Western definitions of location. The lesson, Mohanty (2003) suggests “…for ‘us’ immigrants and migrants: that home, community, and identity all fit somewhere between the histories and experiences we inherit and the political choices we make through solidarities” (p. 135). Such modes of subjectivity identify rather than erase the problematic, “already fixed” institutional practices of the nation states and their histories of subordination exposed within postcolonial and anti-racist theoretical paradigms. It is these forms that allow

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one to recognize and to locate privilege by considering one’s own position and location within society. By examining the everyday personal as well as political experiences, Mohanty uses her own experiences to mark the beginnings of feminist praxis. It is not questions of identity that she is focused on, but rather she aims to create a global dialogue of how the personal and the political exist and in what ways they affect the inclusion of feminist praxis. Mohanty seeks a feminism that recognizes and acknowledges the differences between women, such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and disabilities (Mohanty 2003, p. 3). It is thus expressed that we need to be inclusive in our thinking, and our thinking and organizing need to be contextually rooted in questions of history and experience. Similarly, transnational feminist scholars, such as Sherene Razack, argue that racialized women become bodies to be saved by white women, although “saving” happens differently in each geographical location. For instance, Razack uses the example of racialized immigrant women at universities in North America. She states, Imperial knowledge production is drawn in various ways, usually subversive. That women and minorities are bodies that do not belong in the hallowed halls of academe is underlined repeatedly through racial and sexual harassment in universities, and the powerful backlash against hiring and promotion of Aboriginal and minority women. (Razack 2000, p. 47)

Such forms, Razack (2000) claims, are “part of a continuous imperialist way of thinking which assumes that we can only understand women as victims or agents, saviours or as being saved, but not complicated subjects with different histories, experienced within various positions in hegemonic systems” (p. 50). Such imperialist notions, which are systemically embedded in mainstream feminist theory, remain contested and problematic through the homogenization of non-Western women. In trying to break through the site of such discursive politics, raced and gendered knowledge is produced, organized and regulated. In order to provide a broad-based feminist, anti-violence movement, women’s lived experiences and their own genealogies create a site for struggle and activism. Such feminist praxis calls for dialogue and organizing for change between women across and beyond borders. This is not suggesting that all women, because they are women, must have something in common, a revision to biological explanations. Racial or class differences may not necessarily bring women together as a coherent group,

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but in order for solidarity to occur and for non-western women’s voices to be heard, understanding such discourses is essential. The issue of violence against women among transnational anti-racist feminists, lesbians, immigrant women, women with disabilities, workingclass women and First Nations women has contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity and diversity of women’s experiences (Morrow 1999, p. 238). Such perspectives, according to Morrow, “address different forms of oppression based on race, economic class, or experiences of colonialism that intersects with sexism and violence” (Morrow 1999, p. 239). By looking at women’s histories, experiences and struggles, we may gain a broader understanding of collective differences in terms of agency and responsibility, so that it is possible to understand one another and to build solidarities across borders and boundaries of nationalism or the state. This kind of theoretical analysis allows women to mediate between different histories and understandings of the personal. In understanding these differences, women can work on the ways in which violence is used to maintain male power. For women survivors of violence, local and international feminist exchanges and perspectives have provided ground-breaking results in bringing gender-based violence to the forefront of humanitarian affairs, according to Cockburn (2007). Cockburn (2004, 2007) draws from materialist feminism, which is inspired by Marxist concepts of economic exploitation and class relations, to provide an expansive approach to understanding militarism and gender relations. She uses positionality to situate knowledge and to observe the way in which women create their own perspectives in collective movements. From a feminist, anti-militarist activist perspective, Cockburn (2004, 2007) illustrates women’s agency and solidarity in anti-war groups. The women’s anti-war groups and the transnational women’s activist networks that Cockburn refers to are women who are not stuck in the position of victim, and in their activism, they refute the notion of women’s victimization and conflict. This does not dismiss that women are not or have not been victims of conflict rather that women’s anti-war activism works to develop and change this idea of victimhood. The feminist movements that came out of Western Europe, Canada and the USA had a privileged white voice in establishing women’s agenda. The movement was designed “to represent the needs of all women” (Lee and Shaw 2010, p. 8). Further, the priorities of white middle-class feminists from the Global North would dominate the feminist struggles in the

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1970s and 1980s (Lee and Shaw 2010). Global North countries, which were currently neither colonized nor at war, had set the stage for social change within a mainstream feminist movement. In the case of Cyprus, “the women of Cyprus did not participate in the global women’s movement of the 1960s onwards but instead experienced ethnic nationalism, militarism, and sexism both prior and after independence […] Cypriot women had to deal with the consequences of armed struggle” (Hadjipavlou 2010, p. 247). In addressing the hegemonic malecentred concept and practice of politics that has marginalized groups in Cyprus, Hadjipavlou (2010) observes that the national struggle and the war sharpened gender and cultural roles, thus preventing Cypriot women from launching a feminist movement. However, the armed struggle during the conflict allowed Cypriot women to participate in different ways (Giles 2003), and although viewed by women from the Global North as constrained, their involvement and experiences were far more complex. For example, women living in refugee camps post-1974 took care of the children and elderly as well as worked in solidarity with other women to keep the family together, whereas the role of men during displacement moved from being a soldier on the frontline to being migrants seeking employment in Arab countries to support their families (Hadjipavlou and Mertan 2010). In order to develop political solidarity among feminists, transnational feminists emphasize that women cannot bond on terms set by the dominant ideology of Western culture. In Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak (1994) writes that the British abolishing the Hindu practice of widows’ immolation (sati) in India was a case of “white men saving brown women from brown men”. Using Spivak’s theoretical framework, in the case of Cyprus, during its colonial period, Greek Cypriot women as subaltern subjects were being saved by Greek Cypriot men from both Turkish Cypriot and white (British) men. Additionally, Turkish and Turkish Cypriot men were saving Turkish Cypriot women from Greek Cypriot men and white (British) men. Spivak (1988) suggests that, “the subaltern subject’s identity is difference, and that there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation” (p. 80). She seeks to go beyond the colonizer and colonized binary by using the subject third-world woman to illustrate additional social hierarchies of power. The third-world woman is colonized by both (see Loomba 2005) and as such experiences multiple oppressions.

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Who is the “third-world” woman? According to Mohanty (2003), she is limited by her gender (feminine and sexually constrained), and being of third-world oppression (ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented and victimized), she is deemed unable to speak for herself. This lies in contrast to the Western woman who is educated, modern, free to make her own decisions and has control over her body and sexuality (ibid., p. 40). By examining the term “third-world woman”, there is a continuous layering of political and social categories that are deeply embedded in colonial legacy. In situating Cypriot women within the context of anti-colonial feminist literature, Vassiliadou (2002) asserts that “women remain marginalized in nationalist discourses because they themselves are constituted by the binaries of modernity” (p. 473). Spivak (1994) suggests that we must be cautious here to acknowledge patriarchy and colonial intellectual thought as playing a role in silencing the subaltern voice. Todorova (2017) takes Spivak’s warning a step further by stating how it is important for, “feminists socialized and racialized as White and European must also interrogate critically and truthfully how they are defined by these formations. Bridging the lives and experiences of women across the First, Second, and Third Worlds” (p. 136). Who speaks for whom, and under what conditions? While transnational feminism provides a framework to understand conflict areas that have been framed by histories of colonialism and imperialism and have maintained colonial economic, cultural and military practices. For example, this strand allows us to explore the combat economy in a highly militarized state such as Cyprus, which provides “theme parks” for UN Peacekeeping soldiers and Turkish, as well as Greek troops, to give them access to women who have been trafficked in the northern part of the island, where basic rules and principles do not apply because the occupied area is not recognized by the international community. Agathangelou and Ling (2003) suggest that violence and sex in Cyprus are deeply intertwined in peacekeeping and war: “a Mediterranean gateway for prostitution and sex trafficking and also the world’s oldest site for UN peacekeeping. These women’s voices underscore the coercion, desperation and assault on human dignity that sex trafficking entails” (p. 214). This example demonstrates the way in which the war and capitalist machine reinforces and creates spaces where women endure violations and gender-based violence, and yet have not been officially recognized in the mainstream narrative of the war. Human trafficking, therefore, is reduced to another unfortunate symptom of conflict.

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However, women in Cyprus live in and among worlds: that of Hellenism; that of the colonizer (Europe), the colonized (men) and the Orient (Turkey) (Morgan 2011) and as such multiple power dynamics are at play. Women Cypriot women begin the process of decolonization through recognizing their similarity and difference to the West and their multiple identities. Anti-racist and indigenous feminism offers entry points of engagement through unpacking the various intersections at play within Cypriot identity and reclaiming a Cypriot identity in the postcolonial period. For example, there are multiple layers to ethnic identity constructions in Cyprus. There are women who claim a Greek or Turkish identity, excluding their Cypriot identity, while women from workingclass backgrounds claim a Cypriot identity and downplay Greek or Turkish identities. Women who are half British, called “Charlies”, tend to recognize their Cypriot identity more than their British identity. There is, therefore, a need for a multi-communal feminist movement on the island to create the opportunity for all women in the various ethnic communities to challenge the patriarchal order. The gendered nature of war in transnational feminist literature examines the way in which women confront war, the impact that war has on women due to their gender and the diverse ways that women respond. Mohanty (2003) explains, “… women often pay a price for daring to claim the integrity, security, and safety of our bodies and our living spaces” (p. 2). For women whose communities are socially marginalized, identifying male violence may be seen as class or racial “treason” (Morrow 1999, p. 252). Furthermore, white middle-class feminists must recognize these complexities and how they affect the practices and activist strategies among the greater anti-violence feminism movement. Understanding the ways in which violence may be used to perpetuate male power is of critical importance for women working across differences in political solidarity. Frameworks of understanding sexual violence are broad-based with a wide range of feminist activism. Consequently, feminist approaches to violence against women have built the groundwork for how we understand rape or sexual assault. Networking among groups overseas plays a critical role in creating a more inclusive framework in understanding violence against women (Morrow 1999, p. 254). While existing factors of violations against women’s human rights are at play in peacetime, it is possible for these factors to still be at work at a time of conflict.

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I extend the aforementioned scholarship to conduct an ethnographic examination of the narratives of women’s groups organizing for peace in Cyprus, and, in doing so, I ask the groups to identify their successes and challenges in peacebuilding and reconciliation in an ethnically divided society that is rooted in colonialism, nationalism and militarism, and as a result has a misogynistic as well as xenophobic culture. Turkish Cypriot women expressed their fears towards both Greek Cypriots and the Turkish army, including the foreign armies (British Forces and the UN Peacekeeping Force) since Cyprus remains a highly militarized state (Hadjipavlou and Mertan 2010). This kind of trauma and violence has remained hidden in women’s bodies. These are scars that do not disappear easily, and some die and take their wounds with them. The pain and violence of the island has been inflicted on the bodies of all ethnicities. I interrogate the process of feminist peacebuilding in Cyprus by bringing to the forefront the following: the ways in which women’s groups have organized at the grassroots level as a means of contributing to positive social change; the different levels at which women mobilize for the participation and inclusion of women’s perspectives at the peace negotiating table; and the difference between peacebuilding and official negotiations that serves as a reminder of the complexity of the “frozen conflict”. In exploring women’s groups that focus on peacebuilding, I investigate the mechanisms that make it possible for the Cyprus Problem to dominate every aspect of Cypriot society. I am concerned with understanding why the women participants in this book have chosen to participate in Cypriot women’s movements and how these organizations emerged, developed, and if so, declined, succeeded or failed. A comparative analysis of each group is documented and provides access to member dynamics, participation in early stages of members’ decision-strategies within the groups and the institutionalization of protests/campaigns. The literature theorizing transnational feminism is incomplete, since it does not adequately address women in divided societies. Women of Cyprus are a particular case in that they do not necessarily experience the narrative of women in the Global South or the third world, as Vassiliadou (2002) states, the “issues of female circumcision, the veil, famine, religious ‘fundamentalism’, [and] succession in terms of (male) royalty” (p. 474) that appear in the third-world narrative do not apply to women of Cyprus. which is reflected in transnational feminist works, but they have experienced European integration, and their Hellenic as well as Ottoman

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roots also impact their lives. The general issues facing women in the Middle East countries like Jordan, Iraq, Syria or even Lebanon, do not necessarily translate to Cyprus.

References Agathangelou, A. M. (2000). Nationalist Narratives and (Dis)Appearing Women: State-Sanctioned Sexual Violence. Canadian Woman Studies, 19(4), 12–21. Agathangelou, A. M. (2002). Globalization and Radical Feminist Pedagogy: Forging Trans-Border Solidarities Through Student Activism. In N. Naples & K. Bojar (Eds.), Teaching Feminist Activism: Strategies from the Field (pp. 138–153). New York: Routledge. Agathangelou, A. M. (2003). Envisioning a Feminist Global Society: Cypriot Women, Civil Society and Social Change. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 5(2), 290–299. Agathangelou, A. M. (2006). Colonising Desires: Bodies for Sale, Exploitation and (In)Security in Desire Industries. The Cyprus Review, 18(2), 37–73. Agathangelou, A. M., & Killian, K. D. (2002). In the Wake of 1974: Psychological Well Being and Post-Traumatic Stress in Greek Cypriot Refugee Families. The Cyprus Review, 14(2), 45–69. Agathangelou, A. M., & Ling, L. (2003). Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order. Brown Journal of World Affairs, 10(1), 133–148. Chen, K. (2010). Asia as Method: Toward De-Imperialization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cockburn, C. (2004). The Line: Women, Partition, and the Gender Order in Cyprus. London: Zed Books. Cockburn, C. (2007). From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism, and Feminist Analysis. London: Zed Books. Demetriou, C. (2007). Political Violence and Legitimation: The Episode of Colonial Cyprus. Qualitative Sociology, 30(2), 171–193. Fanon, F. (1999). Concerning Violence: The Wretched of the Earth. In M. Stegar & N. Lind (Eds.), Violence and Its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader (pp. 157–168). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Faustmann, H. (2001). The United Nations and the Internationalisation of the Cyprus Conflict 1949–1958. In J. Ker-Lindsay & O. Richmond (Eds.), Promoting Peace and Development in Cyprus Over Four Decades (pp. 3–49). Houndsville, UK: Macmillan. Faustmann, H. (2017). The Struggle for Recognition and Political Rights of the Small Ethnic and Religious Minorities at the End of British Colonial Rule in Cyprus. In A. Yiangou & A. Heraclidou (Eds.), Cyprus from Colonialism to

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the Present: Visions and Realities: Essays in Honour of Robert Holland (pp. 88– 111). London: Routledge. Faustmann, H., & Solomou, E. (2011). Independent Cyprus, 1960–2010: Selected Readings from the Cyprus Review. Nicosia: University of Nicosia Press. Faustmann, H., & Varnava, A. (2009). Reunifying Cyprus the Annan Plan and Beyond. London: I.B. Tauris. Giles, W. (2003). Feminist Exchanges and Comparative Perspectives across Conflict Zones. In W. Giles, M. De Alwis, E. Klein, & N. Silva (Eds.), Feminists Under Fire: Exchanges Across War-Zones (pp. 1–14). Toronto: Between the Lines. Hadjipavlou, M. (2004). Women in the Cypriot Communities: Interpreting Women’s Lives. Nicosia, Cyprus: The Peace Center. Hadjipavlou, M. (2010). Women and Change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict. London: I.B. Tauris. Hadjipavlou, M., & Mertan, B. (2010). Cypriot Feminism: An Opportunity to Challenge Gender and Inequalities and Promote Women’s Rights and a Different Voice. The Cyprus Review, 22(2), 247–268. Jusdanis, G. (2001). The Necessary Nation. NJ: Princeton University Press. Lee, J., & Shaw, S. (2010). Women Worldwide: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Women. New York: McGraw-Hill. Loomba, A. (2005). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge. Meintjes, S., Pillary, A., & Turshen, M. (2001). There Is No Aftermath for Women. In S. Meintjes, A. Pillary, & M. Turshen (Eds.), The Aftermath: Women in Post-Conflict Transformation (pp. 3–18). London: Zed Books. Mohanty, C. (2003). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. London: Duke University Press. Morgan, T. (2011). Sweet and Bitter Island. London: I.B. Tauris. Morrow, H. M. (1999). Feminist Anti-Violence Activism. In A. Munslow (Ed.), Reclaiming the Future: Women’s Deconstructing History. London: Routledge. Razack, S. (2000). Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder Pamela George. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 15(2), 91–130. Riley, R., Mohanty, C., & Pratt, M. (2008). Introduction: Feminism and US Wars—Mapping the Ground. In R. Riley, C. Mohanty, & M. Pratt (Eds.), Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism (pp. 3–16). London: Zed Books. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–316). Urbana: University of Illinois. Spivak, G. (1994). Can the Subaltern Speak? In P. Williams & L. Chrisman (Eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader (pp. 66–111). Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hertfordshire.

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Todorova, M. S. (2017). Race and Women of Color in Socialist/Postsocialist Transnational Feminisms in Central and Southeastern Europe. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 16(1), 114–141. Retrieved October 9, 2018, from Project MUSE database. Vassiliadou, M. (2002). Questioning Nationalism: The Patriarchal and National Struggles of Cypriot Women within a European Context. The European Journal of Women’s Studies, 9(4), 459–482.

CHAPTER 4

Women’s Voices, Women’s Wisdom

Abstract This chapter presents the case of the United Nations, gender mainstreaming, and the UN’s role in women’s civil society on the island and presents the three Cypriot women’s organizations: Hands Across the Divide (HAD), the Gender Advisory Team (GAT) and Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (MIGS). Participants included founding members and current as well as past members, who shared with me their experiences along with their group’s milestones, accomplishments, activities and other events, as well as details on changes in leadership. Key findings discussed in the chapter include: when each group was created and how; for what purpose each group’s founding members organized; the main principles and mission of each group; consistencies in their activism within Cypriot society; changes to date, and their successes as well as failures, considering the Cyprus Problem; and the important differences in the ways these three organizations have worked toward peacebuilding over the past 13 years. Keywords Women’s organizing · Gender mainstreaming · Annan Plan · Women’s rights

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Introduction In this chapter, I will discuss the United Nations’ role in civil society, primarily its impact on women’s organizing for peacebuilding and the result of such an intervention on civil society. The first section will assess the way in which gender is mainstreamed in women’s peacebuilding initiatives in Cyprus and how the UN’s role and mandate have influenced how gender is understood, the challenges in gender mainstreaming in civil society and the peace process. Then, I will discuss the three women’s groups in this book and present their group’s milestones, accomplishments, their activities and other events as well as changes in leadership.

A United Nation’s Pet Project The sole purpose of the United Nations in Cyprus is to provide its assistance to the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities in their attempts to bridge their differences, and to assist the communities to reach a negotiated settlement. Working on behalf of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Office, a Special Adviser on Cyprus is appointed to assist the parties in the conduct of full-fledged peace negotiations, aimed at reaching a comprehensive solution under the auspices of the UN Security Council and its Resolutions on Cyprus. The peace talks are conducted under a closeddoor policy and are leader-led (the President of the Republic of Cyprus and the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community). The UN mediator is present with his/her team while the leaders include their advisors known as the Greek and Turkish Cypriot negotiating teams. Despite the establishment of working groups and technical committees on education and human rights, gender issues are not included in the leader-driven meetings. Since 1998, specialized agencies of the United Nations, known as the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), established themselves as agents of peace and neutrality on the island. The purposes of the programmes of these specialized UN agencies have been to “support peacebuilding efforts and encourage Greek and Turkish Cypriots to cooperate, to develop trust, and to actively participate in intercommunal reconciliation” (Lachmansingh and Weden 2009, p. 12). UNDP-funded projects have included the following: The BiCommunal Conference on

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Gender in the Mediterranean: Emerging Discourses and Practices; International Women’s Day Celebration; Empowering Young Women for Success: Workshop For Young Women; Women in Business workshop; Workshop in Setting Up a Health Center for Domestic Violence Victims, and an Empowerment of Women workshop (Hadjipavlou and Kanol 2008). UNDP’s mandate under the framework of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 recognized the importance of empowering women to become active participants in peace recovery efforts and conflict resolution. The drive to include women in the Cyprus talks created a critical force of ownership on both the part of women’s organizations that were consulted as informal advisors to the UN agencies and civil society. In 2005, the UNDP implemented an island-wide project with UN funds, called Action for Cooperation and Trust (ACT), followed by UNDP ACT II in 2008 and UNDP ACT III in 2012–2013. The official and formal peace talks had stalled in 2005 and UNDP ACT’s goal was to strengthen civil society and its capacity to engage in bicommunal initiatives. UNDP ACT positioned itself to assist in rebuilding via programming conducted by Cypriot civil society. Primarily the focus has been on key change agents that embrace bicommunal activism, mainly policymakers, journalists, educators, academics and researchers. In 2008, when the then leaders, Turkish Cypriot leader, Mehmet Ali Talat and newly elected President of the Republic of Cyprus and leader of the Greek Cypriot community, Demetris Christofias, finally agreed to restart negotiations, UNDP ACT II began a second phase of civil society engagement to complement the formal peace process with the full support of the Secretary-General. UNDP ACT II prompted a new set of initiatives such as cultural heritage restoration projects, youth engagement, implementation of gender mainstreaming in civil society projects and creation of a roster of local experts who could be utilized by the UN system to offer recommendations to the United Nations Security Council. In 2000, the year that UNSCR 1325 was established, then Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan engaged with the Security Council for the push of working with women’s organizations of member states and to promote the rights of women. The concept or idea that the inclusion of women in peace negotiations is in fact an essential component of sustainable peace and reconciliation trickled down the pipeline from the UN Secretariat in New York to the UN Mission in Cyprus.

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Hands Across the Divide Hands Across the Divide (HAD) was established in 2001 as the first bicommunal women’s organization in Cyprus. HAD was the first group to have one organizational structure as opposed to the traditional two separate structures (Greek Cypriot in the south and Turkish Cypriot in the north). The group is centred around support for reunification of the island and gender mainstreaming in all policies and institutions as well as to promote the elimination of all forms of violence. HAD is the first women-only group that included both Greek and Turkish Cypriot women, a revolutionary stance in and of itself, defying the status quo by envisioning a non-divided, non-militarized and non-patriarchal Cyprus. Members are principally women who are residents in either the north (Turkish Cypriot) or south (Greek Cypriot) of the island, although the NGO includes women from overseas considering the diasporic and mobile nature of the Cypriot society. HAD has come together to form a unitary organization, despite differences of ethnic or national identity, and even geographical location. Members who signed the memorandum of understanding in London in 2001 as founding members include: Maria Hadjipavlou, Magda Zenon, Sevgül Uluda˘g, Magda Zenon, Maia Woodword, Katie Economidou, Anna Agathangelou, Emine Çolak Rita Pantazi, Tina Adamidou, Aydin Mehmet Ali, Emine Ibrahim, Nana Achilleos, Fatma Azgin, Selma Bolayir, Sulay Hassan, Sue Lartides. Long-standing and ongoing members as well as founders include Maria Hadjipavlou (ongoing president), Sevgül Uluda˘g, Magda Zenon, Maia Woodword and Katie Economidou. The majority of the members are peace activists, academics and researchers who were educated outside of Cyprus, primarily at British universities. This foreign educated, elite group was exposed to Western epistemology in relation to feminism, gender and peacebuilding. With the neocolonial, Eurocentric tools at hand, members returned to Cyprus in post-1974 to work on gender issues and the inherent stigmas and marginalization that women on the island face. HAD, as an organization, is viewed by its members as instrumental in bringing communities from both sides of the island together and in breaking down the myths that the dominant Greek and Turkish Cypriot narratives have of “the other”. Women have lived with the effects of intercommunal and intra-communal violence and insecurity for decades, and the experience of violence and fear have taken a severe toll not only in the public sphere but also in the private sphere between individuals, within

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families and in communities. This is one of the ways in which the armed conflict has been a gendered issue. The members make the connection between the ideas inherent in militarism, patriarchy, nationalism and capitalism. They point out that the island hosts a militaristic environment, and the “enemy images” are visible in the barbed wires, military markers, the Blue Berets, and signs that read: “Buffer UN Zone”; “Beware Mine Fields”; “No Entry: Occupied Zone”; “Dead Zone”; “No PhotographsSecurity Zone”. HAD’s activism is against Greek and Turkish Cypriot militaries and members would like to see the Greek and Turkish armies and also the island’s guarantor power, Britain withdraw from the island. Cyprus has been home to the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia since independence. HAD advocates for the removal of all land mines which were laid along parts of the demarcation line, or Buffer Zone. Additionally, depending on where one stands, an array of flags can be seen either together or apart, representing Greece, Turkey, the Cyprus Republic, the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, the United Nations and the EU, all of which are the various stakeholders of the Cyprus issue. Instead of an investment in the military, HAD would like to see a greater investment made into social services, such as free daycare centres and educational facilities for the whole island. They also would like to see an end to the obligatory military service for Greek Cypriot males at the age of 18. HAD affirms that this obligatory army service creates a hyper-masculine culture that leads to violence in general as well as violence against women. HAD views nationalism as being strictly tied to a male centre of organizing. For example, nationalist ideologies and military discourse place women in roles that constrain them to mother and reproducer of the nation state. HAD member, Magda Zenon, uses the reports of rape in 1974 to emphasize this example further, “Genderbased violence occurred in 1974 as a means of fracturing social structures and weakening the “enemy”, by humiliating and torturing women and girls of the other” (M. Zenon, interview, July 10, 2015). HAD applies transnational feminist theory as imperative to understanding the various ways women are exposed to violence. HAD acknowledges that women’s experiences are not universal. A significant contribution of HAD’s organizing and work has been to push transnational feminist perspectives that reveal the relationship between all forms of violence, whether domestic, social, institutional or international. All violence stems from the imbalance of power and resources that prevails

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in a male-dominated world in which women’s participation and perspectives on the vital issues of war-making, peacemaking and reconstruction are either absent or markedly under-represented. HAD’s mission is primarily focused on achieving a peaceful solution to the Cyprus “frozen conflict” and the full demilitarization of troops on the island. The vision of HAD is as follows: “We aspire to live in a united country and to create a democratic society, where there is equality, including equal access to resources and gender equality, and respect for all, irrespective of differences. Our mission is to contribute towards a culture of peace and multiculturalism”.1 HAD attempts to promote a different view of politics and to define security to include human security as well as military defense. They use parts of transnational feminism (Hadjipavlou 2010) by putting an emphasis on a culture of inclusion and care, and by working within a more transnational understanding of the “other’s” perspective and towards structures that connect rather than divide people. A major focus of transnational feminist practice has been speaking about gender in relation to the dominant discourses of globalization, nationalism and the state, as well as recognizing that nationality, gender, religion, class and caste situates people unevenly. Indicative of the divided island, HAD places importance on taking into account ways that larger scale processes, such as militarism, capitalism and nationalism, affect the local level, from the community to the home. HAD’s activism also focuses on the inclusion of external partners to make their voices heard on an international platform. This involved the assistance of Cynthia Cockburn, feminist, peace activist and visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at City University London, and an honorary professor in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick. Member Olga Demetriou explains, “Cynthia came to speak and was a definite factor in establishing HAD. Cynthia shared insights into her own work or what she called action research in Cyprus. HAD received international recognition with the support of scholar and peace activist Cynthia Cockburn” (O. Demetriou, interview July 2014). The support from Cynthia Cockburn assisted HAD’s methods of activism and organizing, which included peaceful candlelight vigils and demonstrations. She helped to start the women’s group and was instrumental in organizing working groups that came up with specific ideas for activism. 1 Paper presented at the conference on “Gender in the Mediterranean: Emerging Discourses and Practices” March 5–7, 2004, Intercollege, Nicosia, Cyprus.

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As founding member, Maria Hadjipavlou, suggests, “There needs to be acknowledgment because she had input and offered help/suggestions. She assisted HAD in registering the group in London” (M. Hadjipavlou, interview July 2014). The need for a bicommunal women’s group was something that Greek and Turkish Cypriots wanted for a long time prior to Cockburns’s participation and assistance. Cockburn’s research on Cyprus was published in The Line: Women, Partition, and the Gender Order in Cyprus, and she assisted HAD until the text was published. The first bicommunal meeting of the group was in London in 2002 because it was not possible and, in fact, it was deemed illegal for women of Greek and Turkish Cypriot background to meet, let alone cross the Green Line. The meeting in London required a lot of courage in many respects, especially despite the rhetoric around women staying quiet and out of peace processes. Emine Çolak, former minister of foreign affairs of the “TRNC”, a lawyer and activist, recounts that “governments from both sides and diplomats wanted us to stay out of it” (E. Çolak, interview June 2014). The “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” is only recognized by the Republic of Turkey. While Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots recognize Mustafa Akinci as president of the “TRNC”, the international community considers him the communal leader of the Turkish Cypriots. As the government of the Republic of Cyprus remains internationally recognized as the government of the whole of the island, the entire island is now considered to be a member of the European Union. However, the Acquis Communitaire is suspended in northern Cyprus pending a political settlement to the Cyprus Problem (see Protocol No. 10 of the Accession Treaty). Emine recalls that the foreign minister of the “TRNC” invited the Turkish Cypriot contingent to meet for tea and cakes, during which he explained to the group that they must not attend the meeting with Greek Cypriot women in London without the government’s permission and furthermore they must not attend any events that were not official peace meetings. The group of women contacted the president’s office and made an appointment with Denktash to explain to him what they as a civil society were doing. Some of the women said that it would be no use to convince the Turkish Cypriot leader that women had a role to play in peacebuilding. Emine explains, “Those who want to try their luck, and this group went, and what happened was he called the press and went on national TV and he had a go at the women’s group. He said what the hell are you doing? Sitting on the laps of foreigner and you cannot see

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that they are using you. And he said thank you and sent off the press” (E. Çolak, interview June 2014). While in public the Turkish Cypriot leader was against the women’s civil society group and their meeting in London, he was a different man when the press was gone, and off the record he was “fine” with what they were doing. When the group of women applied for visas to attend the meeting in London with their Greek Cypriot counterparts, government officials at the airport refused to allow them to leave the “TRNC”. While some were able to leave depending on which passport they held (some had UK passports), Emine recalls, “We were a minority and held our head up disproportionate membership that made us feel traumatized and humiliated, it was a breach of freedom of movement” (E. Çolak, interview June 2014). The activists decided to file a case against the state for breaching their human rights. It took over ten years, although they eventually won because it was accepted that the women were citizens and the state cannot prevent them from travelling. The case began because these women were going to a conference in London to meet Greek and Turkish Cypriot women. During their first meeting, they established a set of goals and outcomes for their organizing. A common thread for HAD members is that they are, “committed to a solution to the Cyprus Problem” (M. Hadjipavlou, interview July 1, 2014). They discussed in their workshops the question “What do we want a peace agreement for?” Each member has in mind particular objectives that they personally want to contest for and what they believe peace could bring. First, each member wants to be defined as “Cypriot”. Turkish Cypriot members urgently need some changes, because the conditions there are particularly challenging for women since the international community, except for Turkey, does not recognize the north of the island. HAD’s mission drew the interest of women’s groups in Greece and Turkey, which continue to support HAD in its development and struggle to build peace, particularly in its lobbying efforts for members’ participation in the formal peace negotiation process. HAD played a significant role in Cypriot civil society by mobilizing women from both sides during a time when meeting across the divided line was dangerous and unheard of. Their peace work gave women living on the divided island a new vision of organizing and thus mobilizing an international campaign against the “Green Line” and a call for the support of women’s human rights,

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freedom of movement and communication throughout the divided island (Cockburn 2004). HAD’s first bicommunal activity was when the President of the Cyprus Republic, Glafcos Clerides, went to the occupied north to have dinner with Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot leader, to mark the resumption of the peace talks on December 5, 2001. Carrying HAD banners and balloons, the Greek Cypriot women demonstrated at the Green Line and the women in the north demonstrated outside Denktash’s house in favour of reconciliation and the resumption of the peace talks. The Greek and Turkish Cypriot women could not demonstrate together because they still could not cross to each other’s side. They held another demonstration when Denktash visited Clerides on December 29, 2001. There was much resistance to HAD from both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities due to ethnic tensions of siding with “the other” but also because communal organizing and addressing gender equality went against the status quo of adhering to nationalist and ethnic divides. Of particular note is that HAD members became estranged from many of their friends, family and communities when they became involved with the organizations. As a result of their political choices, members became isolated from their communities. Maria Hadjipavlou recounts, “The relatives of the missing would stand near the police checkpoint where we would cross to go to the Ledra Palace and they would swear at us. One day I stopped and I said to come with us to the Ledra Palace to see what we were doing. They said that we were going to meet the enemy, traitor and so on. That was very painful, when you live it. I mean, now I am saying it in a different context, but in those days it was very hard to be told by other women, ‘You are a traitor’ or ‘You are aligned with the enemy’” (M. Hadjipavlou, interview July 1, 2014). Members faced stigmatization and were perceived by each side of the ethnically divided society to be “fighting for the women of the enemy”. The island’s tight-knit communities police its members and will black list or ostracise anyone who strays.2 During the period of 2002–2003, HAD continued to mobilize candlelit demonstrations on the Green Line together with other civil society groups that were calling for peace. HAD took a bicommunal 2 It must be mentioned that other women expressed excitement especially when HAD would go to Pyla (the village where both Greek and Turkish Cypriots lived together) for meetings around HAD activities.

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stance when they sent a press statement to an international press conference held by the Jerusalem Link group in Israel calling for peace in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the statement received support from civil society in Israel. Also during 2002, HAD members developed their conflict resolution and peacebuilding skills through workshops. For example, they invited Marie Mulholland, a North Irish activist, to Cyprus to hold workshops in both communities, to give an open lecture on Women and Peace, and to conduct a workshop on peacebuilding in Pyla, which is a village where Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots still live together. Additionally, HAD members attended a two-day workshop in Vienna with seven members of Winpeace from Greece and Turkey. It was hosted by the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue, a European thinktank where politicians and academics from all over the world could get together to exchange their ideas and views, to analyze complex issues and problems, take a public stance on political events, such as armed conflicts. An important and rather key milestone in HAD’s organizing was in July 2003, when HAD formed the Cinderella demonstration at the Ledra Palace checkpoint on the Green Line. This demonstration addressed the Turkish Cypriot authorities’ establishment of a curfew which involved Turkish Cypriots having to return to the north by midnight, and ultimately having to cross the border to do so. HAD members describe the curfew as “like Cinderella”, who had to return from the ball by the stroke of midnight. HAD agreed that it is unacceptable to place restrictions or limitations on people’s freedom of movement. Since the curfew was midnight, members protested at the checkpoints wearing “Cinderella” gowns which garnered massive media attention. They called on all parties concerned to do their utmost to humanize the crossings, to get rid of all bureaucratic procedures, to lift time restrictions and to give free access to all citizens throughout Cyprus. Due to the extensive pressure and media coverage of this protest, the curfew was lifted a few days later.

The Annan Plan Following the failure of the 2004 Annan Plan from a referendum that resulted in a Greek Cypriot majority No vote, activism involving both ethnic groups hit an all-time low. Civil society initiatives experienced a lull and members experienced activist lethargy. Turkish Cypriots felt that they had “failed to persuade Greek Cypriot counterparts that the time was ripe for civil society to play a leading role in consolidating

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the yes vote in the north” (CIVICUS Civil Society Index Report 2005, p. 124). The Annan Plan created distance among the groups, and ultimately bicommunal activities were suspended until members recovered from the disappointment of the results and the fact that the Cyprus issue remained unresolved. Women’s groups in civil society (those specifically that support reunification) and those in political parties felt discouraged and fatigued from the lack of a resolution. Agathangelou and Killian illustrate further: The Annan Plan Referendum reopened old wounds, fears, and experiences of violence, including foregone and irreproducible orientations toward the future in both the north and south associated with the conflicts of 1955– 1959, 1963,1964, 1967, and 1974. Many of us carry memories, some our own and some intergenerationally transmitted, and frequently there are disjunctures between inherited collective memories and the personal experiences we ourselves have lived – the memories as articulated in the public domain and those in our most intimate places. (2002, p. 20)

There still remains a lack of understanding as to why Turkish Cypriot women felt a sense of betrayal from Greek Cypriot women, who were known to be the majority of No voters. They continued to exhibit resilience in the face of the referendum result. It is important to note that Hands Across the Divide members were especially affected and many of them took a hiatus what they thought their cause was. As a result, international funders, including the UN, recognized the need to assist civil society and shifted the funding accordingly to projects that would further support bicommunal initiatives and build social cohesion. Findings from the CIVICUS Civil Society Index Report for Cyprus (2005) claim that members of civil society organizations point to a lack of transparency, accountability, and a dire need for capacity building in the area of advocating for citizen engagement. The Annan Plan played an important role in HAD’s organizing. Between 2003 and 2007 HAD continued its group activities in the form of press releases and letters to the respective leaders on the eves of their direct talks and collected messages of peace from the public in Eleftheria (Freedom) Square. Of significant note was the report put together by members, addressing what a gender-friendly Cyprus solution would be like. The report was delivered to the two leaders and the United Nations

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mediator, Álvaro de Soto. The period of the Annan Plan was a critical time for HAD members who lobbied for a Yes vote of the Plan. In a paper presented at a conference on “Gender in the Mediterranean: Emerging Discourses and Practices” on March 5–7, 2004 at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, HAD members explained that the Annan Plan gave the opportunity for all living on the island to transform relationships among ethnic groups to include equality, respect, communication and non-violence. The paper was the result of a series of three workshops held by HAD. The paper called for addressing gender issues in a postsolution Cyprus rather than in a Cyprus organized exclusively by ethnicity. One of the most critical and ongoing discussions among HAD members is identifying how much time men and women in both the formal and informal peace debates spend on a “solution to the Cyprus Problem”. The possibilities of peace seem to be on the horizon, almost in reach but never finally attained. In 2004, with the infamous Annan Plan, proposed by the UN Secretary-General’s Office at the Secretariat in New York, peace seemed tangible again and HAD campaigned for a comprehensive settlement of the Cyprus conflict. It is important to note that the Annan Plan did not include UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, nor did it reference gender or women’s roles of participation in the reunification process. The Turkish Cypriot majority viewed the Annan Plan as an opportunity for the future, whereas the majority of Greek Cypriots thought it was a dangerous risk that would lead to the dissolution of the south, referred to as the Republic of Cyprus, and to the “Turkification” of the island. The main issues of security, guarantees for the implementation of the Plan, territorial adjustments, and the property rights for those who lost property in 1974 were highly contested in the Greek Cypriot community. A by-product of the conflict has been the creation of new economic elites in both communities, and subsequently many of them remain invested in the continuation of the conflict. With all of these factors at play, the Annan Plan was defeated in the referenda of April 24, 2004, whereby the Greek Cypriots voted 76% “No” to the Plan and 67% of the Turkish Cypriots voted “Yes”. Savia Orphanidou, a supporter of HAD, affirms that this was a tense time: “I think it was the most intense and powerful, passionate [period] we were really driven by the campaign and the yes vote” (S. Orphanidou, interview September 2014), which would have led to the solution of the Cyprus Problem. The accession of the island to the European Union was not

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strong enough to overcome past divisions and fears. Turkish and Greek Cypriots alike were divided into two categories: the “Nai” [Yes] voters and the people who wanted to vote No, or “Ochi”. Regarding the atmosphere at the time, Savia says, “It was horrible. There was a very bad and a very painful division amongst the population” (S. Orphanidou, interview September 2014). Semen Yonsel Saygun, from the Cyprus Turkish Teacher’s Trade Union (KTOS) and HAD member, explains the importance of grassroots activities within the official peacebuilding process, which in fact she views as more successful in reaching people. She says, “In peacebuilding process, grassroots can touch the people more. It was more tangible basically and during the Annan Plan process when HAD went to villages to talk to people face to face about the Plan, peacebuilding was more real and we could see the results right there” (S. Yonsel Saygun, interview October 2014). For Saygun, dialogue within the communities on both sides was more successful than the official reunification process which left members of society so far removed, distant and detached from the people it wished to serve. Saygun illustrates by saying, “They are trying to get two communities to make peace but not involving the two communities together at all” (S. Yonsel Saygun, interview October 2014). HAD members agree that the period of the Annan Plan was a time when members got together with women from different parts of the island and created a gender equality committee to work with women, because it was easier for women to get together and understand each other. Another significant milestone was in April 2008 when Hands Across the Divide organized the Peace Bus Project. This involved visiting the villages across the southern part of the island. The bus stopped at small towns of Dhali, Potamia and Lymbia, where HAD members met with the mayors and mukhtars, spoke with people in the coffee shops in order to engage with the simple message of peace. In Potamia, HAD met with the Turkish and Greek Cypriot mukhtars and members of the community. The group then proceeded to plant an olive tree near the Turkish cemetery. In Dhali, they spoke with women about the past and the future of Cyprus and about their idea of what peace meant to them. Some of the women living in Lymbia welcomed the “Peace Bus” and toured the village together. They showed solidarity by planting an olive tree at one of the local parks. Magda Zenon, one of HAD’s founding members, recalls that it stuck in people’s psyche because, “It was easy, sociable and they [the members]

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felt as though they were making real contact. If we had someone who had been displaced from there we went past their house the simplicity of it was memorable”. The experience of the Peace Bus was full of contrasting emotions for all members who had experienced a sense of loss. Whether it was the loss of a family member, their home or piece of land, they faced the experience together by visiting other rural areas affected by the conflict. The Peace Bus Project continued with visits all over Cyprus over a year, connecting community leaders and members to engage in a dialogue of peace. In 2009, HAD joined island-wide teachers for a “United Cyprus”, which organized the bicommunal March for Truth and Hope, raising awareness on the issues of history, missing persons and women’s role in the struggle for peace. The organization met at the Eleftheria Square in Nicosia to walk towards the end of Ledra Street (the main street in the old part of the city where people gather) carrying black ribbons to represent sorrow. According to a press release made by United Cyprus, with support from HAD, educators are responsible for seeking, promoting and defending historical truth and not distorting it. This particular walk was one of many that occurred over a span of ten years in which HAD and other bicommunal groups addressed how history is being taught on both sides of the island and how “the other” is portrayed, which continues to create mistrust, xenophobia and fear among the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities. In 2010, Hands Across the Divide began an awareness campaign at the Ledra checkpoint to interview women on what peace was and what it meant to them. Women who participated in the campaign were encouraged to contribute their ideas and make their voices heard. HAD members created a board displayed at the checkpoint that allowed both women and men to include their own definitions of peace. The awareness campaign was part of the project “UN Security Council Resolution 1325: An opportunity for Cypriot women to become actively aware of and engage in the peace-building processes” (E. Çolak, interview June 2014), HAD members focused on furthering the agenda presented in the UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Hands Across the Divide, together with GAT, organized an open event at the Ledra Information Centre, in Nicosia, at which Martha Jean Baker, international vice president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, spoke on UNSCR 1325 and its relevance to Cyprus. This event solidified HAD’s presence in civil society, and HAD’s work

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became internationally recognized. As such HAD gained media attention from both Greek as well as Turkish Cypriot media outlets, and the organization became synonymous with women and peacebuilding on the island. While unity was displayed within their respective communities, HAD’s activities often divided the women, because as Maia Woodward pointed out, “the dominant member were highly politicized academics and there were members of HAD who were not in academia” (M. Woodward, interview March 2015). Some of the members who had not had the experience of political activity and activism wanted to get together to cook, for example, or to connect in a way that was comfortable for them within more conventional Cypriot gender roles. Woodward went on to explain that, “It made sense for them [some HAD members] to share their experiences of living in a divided society in their kitchen, some women did not want to be seen on the street because that comes with a certain stigma and did not want to be involved in the mainstream politics” (M. Woodward, interview March 2015). While some members of HAD simply moved out of Cyprus due to work and other personal obligations, those who did not necessarily agree with the group’s activities on the streets and at the Green Line left the group. A small number of women who were the most dominant and those in academia remained, and most of those members also ended up being a part of the Gender Advisory Team.

The Gender Advisory Team (or GAT) In April–May 2009, UNDP worked alongside the UN’s mission of good offices in Cyprus to recommend the establishment of an informal advisory group with a vision for a reconciled Cyprus, and who had the commitment, passion and a keen sense of how to get things done in Cyprus. Using the UN SG’s mandate for UNSCR 1325 regarding women, peace and security, UNDP ACT II and the good offices developed “partnerships that target key change agents” which led to the creation of a core group of twelve women: six from the Turkish Cypriot and six from Greek Cypriot communities (Lachmansingh and Weden 2009). The vision for this women’s group was to act as an informal advisory taskforce and to become a reference point for civil society groups that are working for peace and most importantly using gender as a criterion to address

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bicommunal co-existence and reconciliation among Greek and Turkish Cypriots. The members of this UN-driven group were already well positioned as activists in the bicommunal civil society community and had been taking part in peace initiatives prior to the establishment of the group. While UNDP ACT II would collect data on the activities undertaken by the group, it is unclear as to how these women were selected to become part of what would eventually be called the Gender Advisory Team (GAT). GAT was specifically established to bring the UN agenda of UNSCR 1325 into civil society and raising awareness on the need for women to sit at the formal peace negotiating table. GAT would not take part in the peace talks, but it was one of the few women’s groups that received ongoing UN visibility, although direct funding for projects was not provided. The UN’s involvement has played a key role in assisting women’s groups to organize and to make recommendations based on a specific neoliberal agenda (Agathangelou and Ling 2003). The UN has done so through the support strengthened in through its public support for peacebuilding initiatives, and by legitimizing through these initiatives the need for women at the negotiating table. The government of Cyprus has largely ignored its obligations under UNSCR 1325 and the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). While the UN’s role is largely viewed by the general public as a mediator, given the lack of women in decisionmaking positions and the limitations of women’s capacity to participate in public affairs, this international body managed to permeate its dominant discourse onto women’s organizing through the formation of GAT. GAT’s objectives were to mainstream gender equality into the peace process and widen peacebuilding and reunification initiatives in Cyprus, by providing input to assess them. The group’s purpose was twofold: the peace process and advocacy efforts. Beneficiaries from this UN model were women in both communities and civil societies in Cyprus. The creation of this group by the UN system in Cyprus, following the bottomup request, appears to be a first both in terms of establishing a reference group of people from civil society who have worked, or are working, on other UN projects and in terms of this being an exclusively women’s group. GAT was officially initiated in October 2009 by civil society activists and scholars from Turkish and Greek Cypriot communities, some of

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whom are also members of HAD, like Olga Demetriou, Maria Hadjipavlou, Magda Zenon and Biran Mertan. While these members remained the core group, others who became involved intermittently were Do˘gu¸s Derya, Umut Bozkurt and Nayia Kamenou, who are young academics and predominant activists of LGBT rights. The core group, and dominant members of HAD, however, were focused on bringing United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 of 2000 on women, peace and security to the Cyprus discourse of the peace negotiations. UNSCR 1325 of 2000 affirms that women can and should be involved in peacemaking. However, GAT research has found that women who work for peace at the community level rarely reach national level, nor do they hold a seat at the international negotiation tables. In the many attempts to solve the Cyprus Problem and “unite” the island, both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities have not been concerned about women’s rights and have dismissed issues of gender. As a result, GAT identifies the violation of UNSCR 1325, essentially the lack of inclusion and role of women on the Cyprus issue. GAT works on both the frontline of peace work with active members from the southern and northern parts of Cyprus, and it is the only women’s organization that has a mandate on the Cyprus issue that includes UN Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security and the role of gender in peacemaking. Olga Demetriou explains, “GAT is a very specific kind of animal. It works on both the front of peace work and feminism south and north Cyprus. Women’s organizations in the south do not consciously have a mandate on the Cyprus issue within gender work”. “This also goes for peace groups that do not have feminism factored into the national problem” (O. Demetriou, interview March 2015). Since its inception, GAT has strived to mainstream gender equality in the formal peace process, by raising awareness to ensure women’s active participation in all phases of the process and by forming a foundation for a peace agreement that is gender inclusive. Cypriot women’s presence in positions of leadership (including those whose work feeds into the negotiation discussions) is very low. GAT suggests that as a result the context of the negotiations lacks a gender perspective. The driving principle guiding equality in the negotiations is identified exclusively as ethnicity and being equitable on an ethnic basis rather than gender according to GAT. Members of GAT monitor the peace negotiations closely, and some of the members actively engage in the

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political arena. For example, during her swearing-in ceremony in the Assembly of the “TRNC”, GAT member and MP Do˘gu¸s Derya forewent the oath in office when she responded that she believes in a united Cyprus. The “TRNC’s constitution” defines the “Turkish Cypriot State” as “one of the two Constituent States of the United Cyprus Republic” and “based on the political equality, bi-zonality and equal status of the two Constituent States, representing the distinct identity of Turkish Cypriots and their equal political status in a bizonal partnership”. Derya deviated from the “official” script and later told the press that the original oath contained male-dominated narrative that did not reflect pluralism. This gesture benefited women and men who want to see changes made in the peace process, especially where women are involved. GAT’s work is largely recognized by Cypriot civil society, both Turkish and Greek Cypriot peace negotiators, and the overall international community, such as the UN. According to one of its founding members Olga Demetriou, “the whole point of GAT is recognizing the personal is political. It is about integrating at the policy level, domestic violence/anti-trafficking small changes and approaches to militarism from a feminist perspective. For example, how men react to militarism and its impact on domestic violence” (O. Demetriou, interview July 2014). While GAT is part of the broader level of civil society in Cyprus, its connections to parliamentarians and government officials leave them outside of the grassroots category. For example, Olga Demetriou, Maria Hadjipavlou (GAT and HAD members) and other GAT members, Biran Meren, Umut Bozkurt and Nayia Kamenou, were invited to meetings with a gender expert from the United Nations who wanted to conduct a needs assessment on gender mainstreaming in Cyprus. However, as Nayia Kamenou explained, “there was much fostering and collaborating mandates already intertwined with HAD and most members knew each other. As members of GAT and some from HAD, we brainstormed particular requests that we had for the negotiating team which is still ongoing, and lobbying to negotiators to incorporate a gender perspective” (N. Kamenou, interview September 2014). This kind of lobbying is heavily reliant on the United Nations to intervene and relay the information to the Turkish and Greek Cypriot leaders. For example, GAT members were perceived by the UN as leading activists in civil society in Cyprus with extensive knowledge and experience. Based on this guidance, GAT took the crucial leadership role to mainstream gender equality into the wider peacebuilding initiatives in Cyprus.

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GAT’s initiatives and leadership were acknowledged by UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon during his visit to Cyprus in February 2010. Reference to the group’s achievement was made in the UNSG’s press releases. In March 2010, a UN consultant met with GAT to support their efforts to contribute a gender perspective to the negotiating chapters under consideration by the leaders. The group made a first contribution in this regard to the two leaders, providing inputs on the issue of gender in the context of governance and power-sharing. GAT was invited on several occasions, from 2012 onwards, to meet with the heads of the United Nations good office mission in Cyprus and Lisa Buttenheim, Special Representative of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. Then again in 2014, they met the Special Adviser of the Secretary-General in Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, whose office organized a special dinner with all GAT members present to offer support to lobby for gender equality in Cyprus. Eide praised GAT for its efforts in its recommendations for the inclusion of UNSCR 1325 in the peace negotiations. This is as far as it has gone. GAT members have also submitted their reports on UNSCR 1325 and Cyprus to the then Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. Despite dialogue and acknowledgement that gender issues are a priority of the United Nations and also the international community, leadership has failed to implement the resolution itself or the recommendation made by GAT in the formal peace negotiations. Subsequently, GAT’s primary form of activism is through the organization of roundtable discussions, conferences and its policy recommendations which are used to push for advocacy and policy change. Its members move between HAD and other civil society organizations that do not necessarily focus on gender issues, like the Cyprus Academic Dialogue, a group of bicommunal academics whose primary research focus is the Cyprus Problem. In 2010, an awareness campaign for UNSCR 1325 was organized by HAD at the Ledra Street/ Locmadji crossing point. The billboard showed a number of bullet points highlighting a variety of ideas on how women view peace and what it means to them. Passersby were invited/encouraged to contribute their views and feelings of what peace means for them on this billboard. In 2012, GAT, in its attempt to engage other local civil society movements, organized a conference on “Women’s Peace: Applying UNSCR 1325 to Cyprus and the Region”. The conference was organized by GAT members who work for the PRIO Cyprus Centre and was funded by

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Norway Grants and UNDP ACT Cyprus. Internationally-renowned feminists and activist women from southern European and Middle Eastern regions, as well as Greek and Turkish Cypriot academics working in the field of gender and conflict, presented insights from their experience in gender mainstreaming in postconflict transitions. Recommendations for UNSCR 1325 in the Cyprus context were needed, and in 2012 the policy brief was published. The publication, “Women’s peace in Cyprus: implementing UNSCR 1325”, included GAT’s recommendations on governance, citizenship, property and the economy, together with explanatory notes on the formation of these recommendations. The policy brief was distributed to the UN officials and the Turkish and Greek Cypriot negotiating teams and those in government. GAT recommendations were important to put down on paper with respect to what the all-male panel of government officials in the peace process were doing. GAT developed synergies with partnering civil society organizations, namely Cyprus 2015, which had the capacity to conduct quality participatory research, and ENGAGE, which has the expertise in advocacy. GAT managed to influence the public and policy makers, in observance of the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325. GAT went on to organize two seminars in 2013 which explored the links between gender, law and citizenship. The seminars were timely given the central role that citizenship has occupied in the negotiations for a peace settlement in Cyprus. Recognizing that forms of citizenship around the world are premised on highly gendered concepts of personhood and state, GAT invited two academics to present on the making of citizenship and gender. Both seminars were open to the public and a number of policymakers were invited specially to exchange thoughts and ideas. The seminars were co-sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and PRIO Cyprus Centre. In 2014 the policy brief on citizenship was published, entitled “Towards a Gendered Peace: Interventions in the negotiation process inspired by UNSCR 1325”. GAT members identify and affirm that citizenship should be conceptualized less as “nationality” (a term that retains assumptions of racialized claims to rights) and more as “citizenhood”. GAT’s publication was also presented to the chief negotiators on both teams along with policymakers and government officials. While the recommendations are largely ignored, GAT’s most memorable campaign, according to its members, was to integrate the set of recommendations in the framework of UNSCR 1325 on women, peace and security into

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the peace negotiation process to truly serve the needs of women in the country. GAT’s policy briefs and publications are important for the dialogue, research and study of Cypriot women and the resolution of the Cyprus issue, but unfortunately, they have yet to be included in the official peace negotiations. Subsequently, the so-called official peace negotiations, being held and implemented under the auspices of the United Nations, have little to no connection to grassroots peace movements. This noninclusive approach, made up predominately of male leaders, conducts the negotiations under a closed-door policy until a settlement is reached. A proposal for a settlement will then be shared with the public, who will decide on it by voting in a referendum. In addition to external structural issues of the formal peace negotiations, internal challenges lie within the structures of GAT. Founding members of GAT do not have a core per se, and therefore, founders have had ongoing fatigue due to having little authority to provide direction, according to its members. While it is a conscious choice not to have a head of the organization, its member Olga Demetriou is quick to point out that a Cypriot women’s movement is based on organizations. Civil society organized women’s marches which became a defining moment for peace and gender in Cyprus. Members believe that GAT is one of many social movements, and the thematic priorities can be at times disconnected, primarily because of the Cyprus Problem. GAT remains challenged with the most common or underlying public discourse, which is to fix the Cyprus Problem first and then deal with gender, and they continue to try and disrupt this ongoing narrative. On May 28, 2015, the leaders of the Cyprus peace negotiations appointed some prominent members of GAT to the Gender Equality Technical Committee (GETC), made up of persons from both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, as a confidence-building measure (CBM). The GETC was put together as part of the fifth CBM, and like all of the technical committees established, was conducted without public knowledge, transparency or process of how participants were chosen and included. This caused a big shift in GAT’s cohesion, and it has remained sluggish since the GETC was announced, causing some of its members to drop out of the group. Since GETC was appointed in August 2015, there is little way of assessing whether gender is now firmly on the agenda of the peace negotiations, as its members have not been able to share their experience or

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findings and dialogue with local women’s groups and civil society organization’s remains limited, due to the fact the GETC works under the conditions of closed meetings and a gag order put in place by the two negotiating teams and its leadership. While the GETC certainly means that a gender perspective should be considered in the official peace process and a commitment to addressing this problem is on the table in some way, its members have not reached out to civil society organizations, because of the confidentiality agreement involved in the role.

The Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (MIGS) MIGS identifies the multilayered levels of discrimination against women in Cyprus and works to address its diverse forms. Its members are committed to the elimination of this discrimination using a combination of research, advocacy and lobbying, as well as trainings and conferences to bring awareness to issues of GBV, human trafficking and women’s rights on the island. MIGS conducts research on, for, and by women, highlights women’s marginalization in Cyprus and in the gender system, and uses the data to make relevant recommendations on policy and practices in related areas. MIGS was one of the first women’s organizations to formally introduce gender within a department at the University of Nicosia. While the University of Nicosia does not have a Gender Studies Department, MIGS was structured to be a think tank made up of members who are academic scholars rather than grassroots activists. Additionally, MIGS positioning in the EU grant funding schemes allowed its members to work full-time for MIGS. Activism as paid work and research is a key difference that has allowed its members to be engaged and to have the advantage of access to resources. Founding member of MIGS, Myria Vassiliadou, was the director from 2003 until 2008, and she started MIGS as a small research centre with four members who addressed issues of gender in Cyprus including that these gender issues were a consequence of the Cyprus Issue. MIGS researcher, Josie Christodoulou, recounted Myria as inspiring her: The truth is I had Myria Vassiliadou as a role model. I started my studies here at Intercollege (University of Nicosia) so Myria was teaching here, so she was one of my professors. She framed everything and addressed the

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issue of gender and gender equality and women’s rights. So basically she inspired me to do all this. (J. Christodoulou, interview April 2015)

In 2008, Myria Vassiliadou moved on to work as the EU AntiTrafficking Coordinator, and Susana Pavlou became the director that same year. Pavlou chose to focus her efforts on showing that gender and peace are not separate from the Cyprus peacebuilding efforts. Pavlou explains, “[T]he role differs from what it should be, since MIGS, over the past 12 years, has become a professional NGO in which its members work full-time and get paid for the projects they implement, which is funded directly by the European Union (EU)” (S. Pavlou, interview March 2014). As such, MIGS is an example of the professionalization of NGOs in Cyprus, since their work is project funded and, as a result, financial management becomes part of their day-to-day activities, in addition to leadership building and strategic planning. MIGS priorities, since its inception, have included violence against women, trafficking women for sexual labour and exploitation, women in the media, gender and education, migrant women specifically as domestic workers, as well as the representation of women in the political and economic fields in Cyprus. These thematic priorities were identified based on Cypriot realities, which were, as Josie Christodoulou identified: Gaps, on a policy level [and] on a practical level. For example, women in politics, women in decision-making, we can see only one female minister on that level. We see some gaps and we try through research to find solutions, so people can see them. We need the proof, if you like, the academic proof. (J. Christodoulou, interview April 2015)

Along with research, awareness raising, lobbying towards policy change, advertising and trainings have also been a big part of MIGS’ activism (C. Khallis, interview March 2015). A research project on identifying abuse of female migrant domestic workers was the first of its kind in Cyprus. The project created awareness and a platform to advocate for the rights of women as migrant domestic workers and assisted in the support of lobbying for equal rights and for labour law reform. MIGS, despite its formal organization structure and continual EU funding, still claims to have a grassroots base by engaging women’s groups, like HAD and GAT, in the peace process on the principles of human rights, and diverging with the Cyprus peace process.

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MIGS member Christina Khallis explained that her inspiration was Professor Maria Hadjipavlou, co-founder and president of HAD and member of GAT, “I received basic training from Maria’s class in peacebuilding methodology and bicommunal work. Through collaboration with Maria, MIGS was able to stay informed as well as to support the divergences of the peace process in Cyprus using a human-centred approach” (C. Khallis, interview March 2015). While MIGS tries to support the activities of other women’s groups, like HAD and GAT, Pavlou says it has limited human resources, resulting in its inability to represent the gender component at civic events or to be involved in every event. Pavlou affirms that, “MIGS cannot do everything but, as MIGS, other civil society groups expect a lot from us in the absence of voices from other groups” (S. Pavlou, interview January 2014). In 2003 and 2004 MIGS and Cypriot civil society experienced a renewed activism on many levels. With the south part of the island heading for EU accession, there were numerous preparations for joining the EU, as well as the Green Line borders which had opened up and there was the Annan Plan referendum. The research MIGS conducted during the period of the Annan Plan shows that women’s political parties organized themselves, while civil society rallied together and became more involved in raising awareness on the peace talks. During this important time in civil society, MIGS both formally, through its research and publications, and informally, through their invitations to speak at events organized by other civil society groups, brought the trafficking and migration discourse to the forefront. Josie Christodoulou recalls her contribution to the Against Trafficking of Women Campaign in 2007, which she affirms continues to be a priority for MIGS in 2014. MIGS was the first NGO in Cyprus that conducted research on the issues of human trafficking on the island. In 2007, Christodoulou and other MIGS members conducted a mapping exercise highlighting the reality of human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Cyprus. Josie explains that, “It was the first time to address [human trafficking] and the demand for paid sex and sexual exploitation, making the connection with prostitution as well. We talked about ‘artists.’ The so-called artiste visa implemented by the Government of the Cyprus Republic allowed performing artists to work in cabarets/nightclubs. This artiste visa enabled traffickers to legally bring women from predominately Eastern European countries into Cyprus and force them to work in nightclubs and to engage in sex exploitation. The artiste visa was abolished

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by the Labour Ministry after pressure from MIGS and other organizations in Cyprus and the EU, demanding policy changes and pushing Cyprus to acknowledge its lack of efforts on the human trafficking of women and girls. At MIGS we had experts at national and international levels on human trafficking, so we use the approach, the so-called sandwich approach. The ‘sandwich approach’ is an NGO pushing your government for policy change; EU experts pressing the button for policy change. I love this method” (J. Christodoulou, interview April 2015). The approach was used to change policy for incoming “artistes”, and MIGS was the first organization to put it on the table with diplomacy, and with cooperation from other civil society groups and policymakers, the artiste policy changed. The second milestone and success for MIGS was that the organization was the first to talk about the demand for sexual trafficking. In two different projects on trafficking, MIGS uncovered in their fieldwork the demand in Cyprus and the connection between trafficking women for sexual exploitation and prostitution. MIGS has made the effort to make people aware of the issue of prostitution in order to affect policy change. MIGS is from the school of thought that sex work and prostitution are not considered labour, and in fact sex work in this instance is perceived as a form of violence, since women and girls involved are trafficked into Cyprus and forced to sell sex. MIGS worked in collaboration with other NGOs from different ministries in Cyprus to open up this dialogue and advocate for policy change. Pressure from MPs and the European Commission resulted in the criminalisation of the demands of human trafficking and exploitation. With the help of other Cypriot NGOs, like KISA the Movement for Equality, Support, Anti-racism and Cyprus Stop Trafficking, EU policy change was mobilized.

One Billion Rising The One Billion Rising event has been implemented by MIGS in Cyprus since 2013. One Billion Rising is a global campaign to end violence against women. The campaign, launched on Valentine’s Day 2012, began as a call to action based on the staggering statistic that 1 in 3 women globally will be beaten or raped during her lifetime. For MIGS, bringing One Billion Rising to Cyprus was important on a global level because it brought various women’s groups together to lobby against violence. The event rallied allies like youth organizations and teachers and their classes,

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or what MIGS calls “Back-to-school initiatives” with teenagers through peer education sessions on gender equality and gender-based violence. Awareness raising among youth in addressing gender equality as well as violence against women in their community is part of the One Billion Rising Campaign. Through MIGS’ work at the advocacy level and their influence at bringing the issue of violence against women and girls to the public sphere, they confronted the taboo about domestic violence in Cypriot society, and that it is in fact not just an issue that should be addressed in the home. MIGS’ addressing gender parity in democracy campaign was used to ask where are the women in politics. While the campaign itself was not successful because of its inability to garner participation from political parties in Cyprus, the data collected showed the lack of mobilization and political will. In their research, MIGS identifies the following barriers to women’s participation in governance: lack of a strong women’s movement; lack of legislative quotas involving women in peacebuilding processes and political life in general; the limited human rights-based approach in political processes; and the lack of political will/ patriarchal attitude towards women in politics. MIGS members believed young men and women benefitted, along with women politicians. However, the findings show the campaign did not have the same impact as the issues of violence against women and human trafficking did, where MIGS presented at parliament, which had influenced policy change. Susana Pavlou pointed out that the study conducted by MIGS on violence against women is especially significant because it brought to light the high incidence of rape and sexual assault cases, which increased 195% during the period 2000 to 2003. MIGS identified that incidents of domestic violence tripled in the last decade (from 397 cases in 2004 to 1053 cases in 2010), with the majority of victims being women and children (85.3%). Pavlou affirmed, “It is clear that there is a general trend of increasing male violence against women. Despite this, Cyprus has one of the lowest conviction rates in Europe” (S. Pavlou, interview April 2014). After MIGS efforts at the Istanbul convention3 on May 11, 2011, hearings and parliament and lobbying meetings changed the way violence against women was understood within the discourse of Cypriot society 3 The Istanbul Convention is the first binding convention to address the prevention of domestic violence and gender based violence by EU member states.

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(S. Pavlou, interview March 2014). On April 7, 2011, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a landmark convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (C. Khallis, March 2015). This convention became the first legally binding instrument to create a comprehensive legal framework to prevent violence, to protect victims and to end impunity. MIGS became a hub for Cyprus and in many ways a specialist on EU policies and laws on violence against women. Pavlou recalled that, “MEPs ask us for the theory of gender to understand, there is an interest to access knowledge and research as well as a need to know what is going on in Europe regarding laws on gender” (S. Pavlou, interview March 2014). The result was an increase in public dialogue on gender equality discourse and working with young people on GBV awareness raising. An overall change in the lives of women who work with MIGS was the use of safe spaces for dialogue. Additionally, MIGS’ publications, in the form of policy briefs published via a digital platform, have reached a much wider audience. The space to speak is perceived by MIGS as small scale within the debates of women’s roles in Cyprus. In fact, women in Cyprus have difficulty negotiating spaces, and Pavlou noted, “[N]othing exists in a vacuum, we influence schools’ educational negotiated spaces” (S. Pavlou, interview March 2014). MIGS works with civil society and the Ministry of Justice and Education to address domestic violence, though teachers, school counsellors, youth organizations and family planning services are limited because there are bureaucratic structures in place within the system. Despite the island being highly militarized and remaining divided, MIGS members explain that, “[Cypriots] function like there is nothing going on” (C. Khallis, J. Christodoulou, S. Pavlou, and C. Angelli, Interviews March 2014). While Pavlou was quick to point out that there has been a resurgence of activism within the LGBT movement in the past ten years, which came of age recently as the generation of Cypriots of post-1974 who studied abroad came back to Cyprus to live. This generation, MIGS suggests, is becoming more politically savvy and has brought a renewed energy and motivation to activists on the island, with a strong European involvement with allies. Accept LGBT Cyprus, a civil society organization that works protect the rights and interests of LGBT people on the island works with and is supported by MIGS as well as the European Women’s Lobby. MIGS’s director, Susana Pavlou, pointed out that, in fact, “everything goes back

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to social movements. It is all connected”. She went on to explain that we (in the Republic of Cyprus) have a president who is very paternalistic. He is always addressing the public as “my children” (S. Pavlou, interview March 2014). Political parties in Cyprus have a paternalistic approach, which can be observed in the decisions that are made by men for men. For example, issues of domestic abuse and violence in the home are primarily viewed as a private matter dealt with in the home. When policies are made, MIGS members affirm that this is through a procedure created by men for men. MIGS member, Angeli explained: “We are workingin this political system which is clearly paternalistic and patriarchal and this creates structures that even if it seems when women enter they are there, but they are not” (M. Angeli, interview January 2014). Women in political parties, the municipal government and stakeholders in the education system have benefited from working with MIGS in recreating language and looking at political engagement and education in Cyprus through a gender lens. MIGS continues to be at an advantage because of the groups’ access to resources and their producing research that will also be circulated within EU lobbying groups. As a result, women’s organizing within MIGS is shared through transnational actions, and new ideas from small countries such as Cyprus are shared and worked into an international platform of groups working towards women’s rights globally.

Window Dressing The UN missions are required to report to the Secretariat in New York on gender issues and the current status of women on the island primarily in line with their policies and Security Council mandates on women, peace and security. The reporting on the status of women and within the civil society activities is largely conducted by HAD and GAT members on a voluntary basis. The members receive the promise from UN officials that their demands and declarations for a position at the table and recommendations for Cypriot women’s issues are addressed in the closed-door peace talks, and the UN receives information for its reporting without utilizing UN funding, although compensation is sometimes offered in the form of funding conferences or panel discussions organized by the women’s groups. It is important to note that the former Special Representative of the Secretary-General and former Head of Mission of UN Peacekeeping

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Force in Cyprus, Lisa Buttenheim, and current Head of Mission, Elizabeth Spehar, support these women’s groups and have engaged in the need to address gender issues and how women of Cyprus, the government and the UN can better integrate gender into the ongoing peace process on the island. While members of MIGS are supported and backed up by EU funding, HAD and GAT does not receive financial compensation, and much of their work in informing the UN missions in Cyprus is done without monetary compensation for the women’s time or efforts. Women’s groups in this book that specifically focused on bicommunal work are the main sources for the UN. This means that those participants must be of Turkish and Greek Cypriot ethnicity, and anyone who does not fit into this binary paradigm is left out of the Cyprus Problem rhetoric. The creation of such an exclusive group backed by UN agencies in Cyprus has created an exclusive group, involving the same people usually because of geographical limitations, as most meetings take place in the Buffer Zone. Subsequently, the UN’s immersion in women’s organizing in Cyprus enables some women while it isolates others who do not fit into the ethnic dichotomy. For example, migrant women who come to Cyprus to work as domestic workers, minority women, or foreign women who have married Cypriots are not considered as part of the mainstream “Cyprus Problem” narrative, and thus, remain on the sidelines of bicommunal work.

Where Are the Women? On the 16th anniversary of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), the absence of Cypriot women from the formal peace negotiations revealed once again a gap between the aspirations of both global and regional commitments and the reality of the peace process on the island. Each group has had a vision of seeing gender equality integrated into the peace negotiations in Cyprus. GAT worked in collaboration with the United Nations good office mission in Cyprus to make the policies of UNSCR 1325 relevant to the needs of women in Cyprus on the issues of citizenship, property, governance and the economy. GAT, along with HAD and MIGS, has worked towards lobbying for change in the public discourse regarding the inequities of women in Cyprus at all levels and by addressing gender inequality in the make up of the peace negotiating teams and the peace talks as a process. Specifically, they want women to be

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included in the peace process, more women as Members of Parliament, change of legislation on violence against women and girls, and gender policies within the educational system. The majority of the conferences and roundtable discussions where members presented their findings on gender issues were poorly attended by men who are in high-level positions and working within civil society, according to the participants in this book and most of the attendees are usually women. Women’s roles throughout the phases of the Cyprus Problem need to be understood, and a full gender assessment needs to be conducted in order to find solutions through policy and appropriate programming. Activist Savia Orphanides explained what the main issue is: Mentality. I think that’s the number one barrier. We are brought into a more patriarchal system. Maybe not to the extent that it was two or three decades ago but still. The father is the man in the house, the patriarch and the women are subordinate. That has got to change. This has been transferred from the family and social life to business, to work, to politics and so this has changed. Other challenges are the fact that women do not think other women are worth voting for so that’s a challenge there. I think women have more jealousy and more issues for other women in contrast to what men, relationships between men. Another barrier is implementing the legislation maybe. I know that, I’m not very familiar with all these regulations, the European regulations, but I know there is one which says that we need to promote quota in order to force to some extent I mean more women in the board of directors in the public companies or we need to put quotas on women getting more involved in politics so maybe we should organize our legislation with the European legislation more. I think that the most important thing I have already said but I will emphasize it because it covers all other issues. It is the change of the mentality in Cyprus, in all levels, at all levels. I think our responsibility, as a young generation, especially women in politics and women in the peacemaking process should be to actually put in more effort in changing the mentality, the way they think, of not older people because that will be a waste of time but, especially, the younger generation. (S. Orphanides, March 2015)

This section has identified in chronological order the three civil society organizations in Cyprus that are women-only and that are working towards reunification and women’s rights across the island. How the group was created and why, their founding members; their mandates; the consistencies of their activism within Cypriot society; changes to-date and finally their successes as well as failures have been identified.

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Epilogue: The Gender Technical Committee As a result of the ongoing lobbying within Cyprus by HAD, GAT and MIGS for women’s participation and representation, the two leaders announced on May 28, 2015 that a technical committee to address gender equality, made up of women and men from both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, would be appointed as part of the confidence-building measures (CBMs), which would create the foundation for good standing for the on-again, off-again formal peace talks. The GETC was put together as part of the fifth CBM, and, similar to all the technical committees established, there was no public knowledge or transparency on how women and men from civil society and academia were chosen to participate. Particularly noteworthy is that four women from both the Greek and Turkish Cypriot sides, who are members of GAT and HAD, were also appointed to the GETC. The GETC’s purpose was to bring gender issues to the table in the form of recommendations on each chapter of the talks. For example, in discussions that involve governance and given the lack of women at decision-making levels, advice was given to include quotas for women’s participation to generate laws or regulations for gender fairness. The composition of the committee’s members is to have channels to the leadership on both the Turkish and Greek Cypriot sides. Since the committee was established in August 2015, there has been little way of assessing whether gender was firmly on the agenda of the peace negotiations, as media coverage was minimal at best and there remained limited dialogue with local women’s groups and CSOs due to the fact the GETC works under the conditions of closed meetings. While the GETC certainly means that a gender perspective should be considered in the official peace process and a commitment to addressing this problem is on the table in some way, its members have not reached out to civil society or to island-wide women’s groups due to the confidentiality agreement involved in the role. At the end of 2016, former members of HAD from the Turkish Cypriot side quit the GETC, stating that the recommendations and largely the concept of a gender committee was not taken seriously by other technical committees and, more crucially, by the two negotiating sides and the leaders. Since key active and founding members of GAT and HAD have been appointed to the GETC it has ultimately led to the dismantling of GAT. GAT went from a strong women’s group, birthed by the United Nations itself, to all its members being inactive and divided. The creation of the

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GETC also generated tensions and distrust between members of HAD on the committee and those members who had not been chosen due to the lack of transparency of the committee. The leadership’s gag order on the GETC also led to the silencing of prominent and key feminists in Cyprus, such as Maria Hadjipavlou and Olga Demetriou. Since its inception the island’s main women’s groups working for peace and reunification of Cyprus are more fragmented, disconnected and divided on activism than ever before. The result has been a hollow and meaningless use of women’s capacity and the failure of a real opportunity to support Cypriot women in political and economic empowerment, in having a more visible and solid place at the peace negotiating table and in being represented equally at all levels of decision-making.

References Agathangelou, A. M., & Killian, K. D. (2002). In the Wake of 1974: Psychological Well Being and Post-Traumatic Stress in Greek Cypriot Refugee Families. The Cyprus Review, 14(2), 45–69. Agathangelou, A. M., & Ling, L. (2003). Desire Industries: Sex Trafficking, UN Peacekeeping, and the Neo-Liberal World Order. Brown Journal of World Affairs, 10(1), 133–148. CIVICUS Civil Society Index for Cyprus. (2005). An Assessment of Civil Society in Cyprus. Nicosia: Management Centre of the Mediterranean and Intercollege. Cockburn, C. (2004). The Line: Women, Partition, and the Gender Order in Cyprus. London: Zed Books. Hadjipavlou, M. (2010). Women and change in Cyprus: Feminisms and Gender in Conflict. London: I.B. Tauris. Hadjipavlou, M., & Kanol, B. (2008). Cumulative Impact Case Study: The Impacts of Peace-Building Work on the Cyprus Conflict. Cambridge, MA: CDA Collaborative Learning Projects. Lachmansingh, L., & Weden, C. (2009). ACT Mid-Programme Outcome Evaluation: Civil Society Strengthened to Effectively Support and Contribute to the Peace Process. Nicosia: UNDP.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Fumbling Towards Sustainable Peace

Abstract This chapter considers areas of further research and methods in which women’s activism can enrich the women’s movement in Cyprus from an intersectional approach. I highlight the ongoing need for women’s equal inclusion in the formal peace negotiations from a transnational feminist perspective. Finally, this chapter will present the potential for future research to continue to push an intersectional agenda for gender equity and women’s rights island wide. Keywords Women’s activism · Gender equity · Intersectionality · Ethnicity/ethnic divisions

This book has explored the experiences of women’s organizing and peacebuilding in Cyprus. The research considers the following questions: (1) How have women’s groups organized for peace? (2) What have been their key issues and organizing strategies? (3) What have been their organizing successes and challenges? I have argued that, central to understanding this women’s activism in Cyprus, is the long-term consequence of the Cyprus Problem that has taken precedence over women’s rights and gender equality on the island for the past 44 years. In relation to the feminist literature on anti-war and peace activism, Cyprus is a site where women are involved in a peace process based on a long-standing ethnic partition, and to which the formal rhetoric © The Author(s) 2021 S. Papastavrou, Women’s Organizations for Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45946-8_5

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for peace on the island is relegated, affirmed and promoted. I have shown that women’s organizing is carved out in women’s communities that are fragmented within the divided ethnic communities themselves. Women’s groups have established alternative spaces in and around the heavily armed landscape of Cyprus. While Cypriot women’s participation in peacebuilding has been largely ignored, I have also argued that within the formal peace process in Cyprus is the fact that issues of gender equality and more importantly the inclusion of Cypriot women’s voices are left out, and as a result this situation has a profound impact on women’s rights throughout the island. The conclusion considers areas of further research, encompassing ways in which women’s activism can enrich the women’s movement in Cyprus from an intersectional approach and provides closing remarks with respect to the limited inclusion in the formal peace negotiations.

Results and Recommendations I have brought to the forefront three women’s organizations within Cypriot civil society that are pioneers in their field and have played a pivotal role in shaping gender issues and peace and reconciliation activism. Each group has utilized grassroots activism as a means of contributing to: gender awareness; gender equality and equity, as well as positive social change; the different levels at which women mobilize to have women’s perspectives included during peace negotiating; and the difference between peacebuilding and official negotiations. The overarching theme and result have been that women’s groups working for peace and the reunification of Cyprus have become, over the past 13 years, fragmented, disconnected, and divided on activism, due to volunteerism fatigue, limited and unstable funding, and stagnated membership. These components have resulted in elite formations and groups made up of the same people, primarily because of small population on the island, the limited use of women’s capabilities, and the failure of the formal talks to take on women’s groups recommendations or provide them with a place at the peace negotiating table. People’s complacency and their struggle to survive in everyday Cypriot society, such as having to work, resulted in maintaining the status quo (K. Toumbarou, interview March 2014). In the 13-year-period covered HAD, GAT, and MIGS have operated to bringing gender and more specifically women’s rights to the forefront of consciousness within the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities.

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Each group has made a concerted effort in its own way, but there are key issues that remain unresolved. Prior to 2004 and the period of the infamous Annan plan, women’s intercommunal peacebuilding efforts were geared towards a solution and adopting European values that include gender equality. The failure of the referendum deepened the rift between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, and as such it impacted the activity of civil society and women’s activism. Additionally, the European Commission’s aid programme for the Turkish Cypriot community did not start until 2006, and the underlying EU bureaucracy led to the delay in witnessing substantive benefits. As a result, the “needs of the two communities [are] very separate and different – added to that the extreme resentment felt by Turkish Cypriot community towards the Republic of Cyprus entering the EU in May 2004, including women and there is the start of your fragmentation of the united efforts” (P. Mentesh, interview January 2015). Upon examination of the post-2004 period, we see that the women’s movement did not try to redefine itself and its goals. The European vision no longer held true for both sides of the divided island, and the longstanding members of the women’s groups were not only unable to redefine their vision, their bicommunal approach to conflict resolution, including direct contact between the two sides and visits to villages, while valuable of course, did not leave room for more innovative approaches to peacebuilding (P. Mentesh and K. Toumbarou, interviews January 2015). Younger members, who sought to bring a new view or approach, chose to align themselves with membership within their own communities, leaving the bicommunal narrative behind and more senior members to continue to lead the group. The inability of each group to change this fixed view and approach continued after 2004 in the fragmentation and disillusionment of the women’s movement in Cyprus. Members from each group who identify that their active engagement is to speak for all women of Cyprus are actually speaking to an elite group of women who have access to funding (EU and UN as well as the diplomatic community on the island). While each group affirms that their mandate and mission is working against ethno-nationalist culture, the power dynamics and the fight against gendered violence have actually worked in reverse and have solidified femi-national politics by continuing to work within the binary of ethnicity and ethnic divisions. Working

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within the bicommunal, bizonal federal approach has led to the segregation of other groups of women living on the island, such as migrants, domestic workers, women married to Greek Cypriot or Turkish Cypriot men, Cypriots from the diaspora, or third culture individuals who are not necessarily on the radar of HAD’s or GAT’s activisim, though MIGS has worked in the past five years to include a gender perspective in the Republic of Cyprus’ immigration and asylum policies, regulations and practices so to promote and protect the rights of migrant and refugee women. HAD and GAT, as well as MIGS, have in their various activities asked the following: Where are the women in the peace process? Why have women been left out of high-level politics? Women are in fact encouraged to stay out of party politics, and the prevailing misogynistic culture affirms that social as well as political structures and processes are not conducive to gender equality. Patriarchal systems are strongly rooted in the ways in which women’s and men’s roles are played out in Cypriot society, which inevitably has an impact on women’s lives both at home and in the workplace, and also within their own ethnic communities. HAD, GAT, and MIGS observe a wide gap between men and women in these positions and continue to lobby the government to apply affirmative action policies, including quota systems or voluntary agreements, and to develop training programmes for women’s leadership not only in the government offices but also within political parties and electoral processes, and in semi-government organizations. Women’s activism assumes that all women in Cyprus understand that they face gender inequity and inequality. Despite them being well aware of political party politics, women’s and men’s ethnic identities are prioritized over classism, sexism and heterosexism, and ableism (for example). As such, the Cyprus Problem narrative and its mainstream rhetoric dominate the lives of both sexes, and it also dominated the ways in which these organizations made decisions. Women also navigate within patriarchal gender relations, and while the women’s groups agree that women on the island are advocates for peace, women are not necessarily natural peacemakers. Greek and Turkish Cypriot women have a sense of loyalty but also receive pressure from their communities to raise their children to honour and respect the entrenched patterns of the past. In essence women become the “defenders of their men”. Women willing to step out of the mainstream narrative of the militarist, nationalist discourse risk isolation

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and are viewed as traitors by their families, communities, and the society in which they live. In order to push a women’s agenda in all forthcoming decisions on the economic, social and political future of the island, Cypriot women need to support each other and raise their voices together. The necessary mechanisms and institutions also have to be developed, which would in turn make intercommunal civil society more effective and empower women’s organizing to influence policy. A paradigm shift is required that would view the Cyprus issue as indeed a shared problem to be solved cooperatively. As such, strengthening women’s groups in peacebuilding is necessary to provide support within the larger civil society community, and this support should be included in programmes for conflict resolution training, group dialogues on different issues, and capacity building for institutions promoting joint projects, as well as empowering NGOs. Daily expressions of a life on a divided island that embodies daily feminist politics must be ongoing. It is important to remember all the groundwork that pioneering institutions like HAD, GAT and MIGS have already done on women and gender issues.

Limitations of the Research In highlighting the development of women’s activism in civil society and, in non-formal ways, in addressing the issues of patriarchal structures, gender inequality, militarism and resistance has brought the underanalyzed issues of the Cyprus’ “frozen conflict” to the surface. The scholarly work on Cyprus is reduced to academics and women’s activists which presented some challenges to the research. These discrepancies are evident in the repetition of references to key scholars in Cyprus who also participated to address the situation of women in their organizations. Furthermore, information and data on women’s organizing were dependent on a handful of sources that were not available outside of Cyprus or were not translated into English from Greek or Turkish. These sources generally repeated the mainstream narrative of the Cyprus conflict in 1974. Focusing on gender issues in Cyprus that were not found in feminist scholarly literature also felt limiting, and I became dependent on my interviews to move beyond the rhetoric of the Cyprus Problem and to rely on the literature on women’s social movements, which was extremely relevant when I looked at the situation of HAD, GAT, and MIGS. This has left migrant women, who come to Cyprus to work

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as domestic workers, minority women or women who have married Cypriots further marginalized from women’s organizing and emphasizes the Cyprus Problem rhetoric. Participant observation was key and allowed me to document the voices of women’s experiences of island-wide activism and engagement to add to small works of feminist literature on Cyprus. As the Cyprus peace talks continue, the women’s groups were keen to address the present issues of the peace negotiations in order to use this book as a platform for engaging with a foreign audience that brings gender issues to the foreground and for opening a space to deliberate on the role women in Cyprus should play in society before and after a solution as well as in the formal peace talks.

Further Research It would be worth extending the literature to look further into the impact that human trafficking and sexual violence, as well exploitation of migrant women coming predominately from the Global South (Agathangelou 2006) to work as domestic workers in Cyprus. Mapping how the cycle of domestication, exploitation and abuse of women by women in Cyprus would build upon the cycle of violence, abuse, and discrimination that is left over from postcolonial structures and the colonial project. A study on the acceptability of human trafficking and domestic migrant exploitation in a “frozen conflict” requires further critical analysis to inform the lack of human rights for some and the respect for human rights for others. The “normal rules of conduct and rights do not apply” in Cyprus due to the normalization of the Cyprus Problem which has resulted in xenophobia, ethnocentrism and patriarchy that perpetuates violence. Further research will also include the examination of dual members of HAD, GAT, and MIGS, working to have gender equality integrated into the peace negotiations in Cyprus. GAT worked in collaboration with the United Nations good office mission in Cyprus to make the policies of UNSCR1325 relevant to the needs of women in Cyprus on the issues of citizenship, property, governance and the economy. GAT, along with HAD and MIGS, lobbied to change the discourse of the inequities of women in Cyprus and thus the negotiations by addressing gender inequality in the peace talks. In examining the absence of Cypriot women from the formal peace negotiations, a gap has been revealed between the aspirations of the

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women’s peace movement, both global and regional commitments, and the reality of the peace talks in Cyprus. Over the past five years, dual members of HAD, MIGS and GAT joined the Cyprus Women’s Lobby (under the umbrella of the European Women’s Lobby) which connects a wide range of women’s organizations and NGOs throughout Cyprus and within Europe. In a similar vein, European-oriented groups that were founded after the pioneering groups include the Cyprus chapter of AIPFE (International Association for the Promotion of Women of Europe), established in 2001, which consists mainly of Greek Cypriot women professionals who disseminate the idea of European citizenship and encourages women to become involved in civil society in Cyprus. Their focus in 2015 onwards has been the Women Fit 4 Business project, which aims at providing necessary soft skills through training, internships and mentoring to young unemployed female university graduates to assist them in their search for employment. Their Gender Diversity in Decision-Making Positions project focused on mapping the local labour market in each partner country, proceeding with necessary training and creating a good practices manual to break down social stereotypes and to make the business case for diversity at a European level. Both projects are funded by the EU. An exploration of Eurocentric women’s organizations in Cyprus requires further work to: (1) examine the desire for women to align themselves with a European narrative; (2) assess if the narrative perpetuates the imperialist project and embodiment of the colonial subject; (3) inquire who is left out of this imperialist project and under what conditions; (4) understand how an intersectional analysis can further examine the multi-level perspectives of power relations that include gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, ableism, leading towards a critical analysis of the issues surrounding the needs of women in Cyprus; and (5) evaluate what has been the response from the Turkish Cypriot women’s community since they have yet to join the EU despite the EU Commission’s team implementing the EU Aid Programme for the Turkish Cypriot Community and assisting the Turkish Cypriots to prepare for the reunification of Cyprus.1 Additionally, a book that includes a comparative analysis of women’s groups from mainland Turkey and Greece would be important to explore,

1 EU law states that Turkish Cypriots are citizens of an EU country even if they live in a part of Cyprus not under government control.

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since the island is affiliated with and in many ways tied to both countries who are the guarantor powers. Addressing their goals and successes, as well as the challenges and differences between the three countries would expand the literature on women’s organizing for peace. Some key research questions would include: (1) In what ways have women’s groups in Turkey and Greece organized for peace and women’s rights; (2) What have been their key issues and organizing strategies? (3) What have been their organizing successes and challenges? and (4) What convergences can be found among women’s groups in Cyprus and the key guarantor countries? Women’s participation in the Cyprus peace process remains one of the most unfulfilled aspects of the women, peace and security agenda in Cyprus. In 2017, the Cyprus talks reached a critical juncture with the involvement of the United Nations Security Council and the conference on Cyprus in Geneva on January 12, 2017. Secretary-General António Guterres, along with Greek Cypriot leader, Mr. Nicos Anastasiades, Turkish Cypriot leader, Mr. Mustafa Akinci, the Special Adviser of the Secretary-General on Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, and the guarantor powers, represented by Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavu¸so˘glu and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, participated in this formal meeting, which has built up hope in many Cypriots that a possible solution to the Cyprus Problem is near. Subsequently, further consideration is required on how the localization and implementation of the Women, Peace and Security agenda occurs in policy and practice while gaining increasing importance in global politics. It is assumed that there will be inevitable tensions surrounding calls for greater local-level institutional implementation of the agenda. What is telling within the negotiations is the lack of understanding on how the humanitarian system functions. Both negotiating teams have failed to see the true necessity of including UNSCR 1325 as part of the pathway towards a sustainable solution to the Cyprus Problem. Instead, the issue has been auctioned off to the intercommunal GETC (Gender Equality Technical Committee), thereby dismissing the importance of creating an organizational environment that enables the adoption of gender mainstreaming in policy, leadership, resources, capacity and accountability mechanisms. While the establishment of the GETC is a step in the right direction, there is need for more gravitas. A verbal statement by the GETC made in March 2016 said: “According to the UNSCR 1325 women should be active

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participants not only at the negotiating table but also in the postconflict peacebuilding processes. We believe that the gender perspective and the recognition of the need to initiate processes to eliminate the marginalization and exclusion of women in the political process in Cyprus has been long overdue”. While this statement represents a crucial step forward, it shows an insufficient investment in technical gender expertise, poor quality gender analysis, complete lack of a gender assessment or evaluation, and a piecemeal response to gender equality in programming. Instead the process requires sufficient human and financial resources to affect gender mainstreaming and capacity building into hard sectors. The gender and security agenda have become convoluted, despite the work of women’s group regarding gender equity in the peace talks. Still there is a continuation of disturbingly, gender-blind standards and discriminatory structures and practices perpetuated on the island. Access to high-level debates on the Cyprus issue is limited, and hardly include the voices of all Cypriots living on the island. Additionally, Cyprus has yet to publish a national action plan (NAP) on United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, but it has adopted a National Strategic Plan on Equality for the period 2014–2017. Unfortunately, this plan does not address the women, peace and security (WPS) agenda and does not even include any references to UNSCR 1325 in its objectives. The prevalent narrative of the government of the Republic of Cyprus and the administration in the north is that Cyprus is indeed a “frozen conflict” and the Cyprus Problem an issue based on ethnic superiority. Despite the overall approach to addressing gender equality by the pioneering groups, a National Action Plan that includes a constitution of a federal Cyprus will be the next step in moving the women, peace and security agenda forward. Simply calling upon warring parties to adopt a “gender perspective” in peace talks is hollow and meaningless unless the international community also provides real opportunities and support for women to do so and to be equally represented at all levels of decision-making in the peace talks.

Coming Full Circle The research questions in this book have asked the following: (1) How have women’s groups organized for peace? (2) What have been their key issues and organizing strategies? (3) What have been their organizing successes and challenges? The women’s groups have organized for peace by developing solidarity networks across the divided island. In

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recognizing Cypriot women’s shared issues, they jointly address domestic violence, human trafficking, exploitation of women migrants and gender inequities.2 The work of HAD, GAT, and MIGS affirm and show the key role women play in a post-solution Cyprus. There key issues and organizing has been through the development of women’s alliances across gender, age, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language, abilities and religious affiliations. The tool of UN Resolution1325 is useful although it is not the only one; however, she and the other women agree that they have been unable to reach women living in areas other than Nicosia and Limassol in their mobilizing efforts. She said that they need to use less academic terminology and specifically less theory in their work to lobby for women’s participation in the peace talks but also for gender issues in general so the women in villages and other constituencies can understand and relate to them. The initial phase of GAT’s work, which was to work diligently on preparing recommendations to communicate to the leaders’ and their representatives, as well as the UN good offices, on all issues under negotiation, and to have meetings with them and to get feedback has been completed. A member from GAT (who asked not to be identified) explained that she stood on the sidelines quietly observing at various conferences, roundtable dialogues, open- as well as closed-panel discussions and listening at social gatherings of experts, journalists, academics and diplomats alike talk shop on Cyprus and its political and economic future. Only one out of ten of these narratives has ever included gender, let alone women. When she has inquired where the women were in the macro dialogue or landscape of the Cyprus Problem, she has often received the same answers: “I have nothing against women in politics”, “There is a woman on this panel”, “That is not my field” or “I don’t do gender”. While the term “gender” includes women and men in its discourse, an adequate understanding of its impact in such formal discussions on Cyprus is fundamentally given no priority. The women’s groups have taken on the responsibility of educating and advocating “us” on the rights of both men and women from various vulnerable groups on the island. Their discussions often involve self-made and carved out spaces that 2 The distribution of power across the ethnic divide prioritizes men, both Greek and Turkish Cypriot. Issues of gender and women’s rights are rejected by the nation-state that has run smoothly due to meeting the needs of the status quo, which keeps men in positions of power.

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include issues that, over the past few years, have seldom been addressed or even debated by politicians or economists, such as the gender pay gap, adequate and safe access to maternal care for all women on the island regardless of socio-economic status or the fact that the deeper we get into the economic crisis the rate of domestic abuse and violence continues to rise (S. Pavlou, interview March 2014). HAD, GAT, and MIGS have organized despite the Cyprus Problem and have strategized based on addressing issues of misogyny, abuse and discrimination against women. With regard to the peace negotiations, members from each organization affirmed the need for the responsibility to address the absence of women at the negotiating table and beyond. The lack of accountability mechanisms that would facilitate the identification and appointment of qualified women candidates as mediators and technical experts to mediation teams along with the adequate training and education in gender issues across the range of subjects continues to be a key concern for all groups. The responsibility for creating an inclusive and participatory environment in the peace talks rests solely on the women, more specifically on the civil society groups and organizations working on a limited or no budget. The challenges within the Cypriot women’s movement has been in being recognized by the formal dominant ideology of the Western European male-dominated culture, while at the same time carving out alternative spaces to continue to speak for themselves and also for those who cannot. In our interview on March 2014, Tegiye Birey affirmed this by stating: [The] women’s movement in Cyprus can succeed with collective action. I cannot guarantee what will happen in the future. Solidarity mostly. More than the political actors, women’s right activists need to work together more than the others. Only with solidarity we also notice the differences. We come from all different political standpoints; we come from different starting points and different methods. Solidarity with difference. At the level of bicommunal civil society, these groups are very much still absent from the mainstream rhetoric of the Cyprus peacebuilding movement. My research has revealed the widespread prevalence of sexism, discrimination, and the denial of women’s rights on the island. However, it is also within these difficult and challenging times that each member has been forced to look their greatest fears in the eye. Cyprus functions within two entities, but what is disconcerting is the “business as usual” idea coming from leadership that was aforementioned by MIGS’s director, Susana Pavlou. At the event on Women’s Peace: Applying UNSCR 1325

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to Cyprus and the Region, in March 2013, I listened to the diverse contributions of scholars in the region who shared their concerns in raising awareness of women’s rights. Members of GAT and HAD, along with MIGS, have asserted the need for the implementation of the UN Resolution and the gaps that have challenged the process. Human rights, equality, and inclusion remain violated as long as there is a patriarchal sex/gender, ethno-national system and class hierarchy in place (Cockburn 2007). In foregrounding women’s inclusion in dealing with the Cyprus Problem and their participation in the formal peace talks or taking the recommendations from HAD, GAT and also MIGS seriously, an effort must be made to advance gender equality practice across the whole island by incorporating women’s perspectives and voices in peace negotiations that goes beyond the European Union, United Nations, and major ethnic groups. Upon reflection over the work of GAT and even HAD during the past decade, Maria Hadjipavlou says she has seen so many convergences regarding women’s ideas, fears, and obstacles, as well as regarding the determination to push the shared agenda for gender equality, whether in representation or participation, or in prevention and post-conflict mobilization. Developing an intersectional and inclusive approach to women’s activism in Cyprus will entail a paradigm shift of the peace discourse in both the north and the south parts of the island, which is dominated by purely ethnic concerns. Women’s activism in Cyprus is ongoing project that requires the push towards a critical dialogue to address the complexities of gender (un) democratic relations in addition to moving beyond the rhetoric of the Cyprus Problem. Consequently, in order to push a women’s agenda in all forthcoming decisions on the economic, social and political future of the island, Cypriot women will require ongoing constructive dialogue and a wide network of alliances in order to support each other and raise their voices together.

References Agathangelou, A. M. (2006). Colonising Desires: Bodies for Sale, Exploitation and (In)Security in Desire Industries. The Cyprus Review, 18(2), 37–73. Cockburn, C. (2007). From Where We Stand: War, Women’s Activism, and Feminist Analysis. London: Zed.

Index

A Acquis Communautaire, 20, 73 1325 agenda, 41 Annan, Kofi, 20 Annan Plan, 2, 20, 21, 76–79, 90 Anti-colonial feminist, 60 Anti-colonial nationalism, 55 Anti-militarism, 24 Archbishop Makarios, 19 Armenian, 17, 18

B Bicommunalism, 2, 3, 21, 69, 73, 75, 95, 101, 102, 109 Bizonal federal approach, 102 Bizonal federal solution, 21 British colonial, 16 Byzantine Empire, 16

C Capitalism, 33, 52, 55 Colonial government buildings, 45 Colonialism, 33, 52, 55, 58

Colonial life, 17 Colonization, 31, 53 Confidence-building measures (CBMs), 97 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 82 Cyprus Problem, 1, 3, 16, 20, 22, 26, 42, 44, 45, 52, 62, 73, 78, 83, 87, 95, 96, 99, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110 Cyprus Republic, 22

D Decolonization, 52–54, 61 Demilitarization, 72 Displacement, 31, 32 Divide and rule, 17

E Enosis, 17 European Commission, 91

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Papastavrou, Women’s Organizations for Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45946-8

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European Union (EU), 3, 15, 20, 22, 25, 47, 73, 90, 91, 105

F Femininity, 37 Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 86 Frozen conflict, 1, 62, 103, 104, 107

G Gender, 22–24, 29, 47, 51, 52, 89, 92, 100, 102, 107, 108, 110 Gender Advisory Team (GAT), 2, 25, 41, 46, 80–83, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102–104, 108–110 Gender-based violence, 25, 36, 38, 51, 54, 58, 71 Gender-blind standards, 107 Gender equality, 1, 100 Gender Equality Technical Committee (GETC), 87, 97, 106 Gender mainstreaming, 23–25, 68, 106 Gender Technical Committee, 97 Greek Cypriot, 17–20, 22, 41, 44, 59, 62, 70, 73, 76–78, 81, 102 Greek Orthodox Church, 18 Green Line, 2, 44, 74, 75, 81, 90

H Hands Across the Divide (HAD), 2, 25, 70, 72, 79, 80, 94, 95, 97, 100, 102–104, 108–110 Hellenism, 16, 17, 34

I Imperialism, 31, 32 Intercommunal conflict, 22 Inter-communal reconciliation, 23

International Association for the Promotion of Women of Europe (AIPFE), 105 International community, 1

L Latin/Latins, 17, 18 London–Zurich agreement, 18

M Maronite/Maronites, 17, 18 Masculinity/masculinities, 34, 37, 43 Mediterranean Institute of Gender Studies (MIGS), 2, 25, 88, 90–92, 95, 97, 100, 102–104, 108–110 Militarism, 31, 32, 42, 44 Militarization, 35, 42–44, 60 Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus, 3

N Nationalism, 31–34, 39, 42, 54, 55, 58 National Organisation of Cypriot Struggle (EOKA), 18

O One Billion Rising, 91, 92 Ottoman, 16

P Patriarchal systems, 24 Patriarchy, 34, 46, 51, 52, 56, 102 Peacebuilding, 3, 30, 38, 41, 46, 51, 62, 68, 100, 101 Peace Operation, 20 PRIO Cyprus Centre, 86

INDEX

R Reconciliation, 55 Republic of Cyprus, 2, 18, 20, 21, 45, 47, 102

S Security Council Resolution 1325, 30

T Transnational feminism, 25, 55, 60, 62, 72 Transnational feminist, 26, 52, 55–57, 61, 71, 72 Turkish Cypriot, 17–20, 22, 41, 44, 59, 62, 70, 73, 74, 77, 81, 102, 105 Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), 19 Turkish resistance organization (TMT), 18

U United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 68 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 68

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United Nations Peacekeeping Force (Cyprus), 21, 44 United Nations Peacekeeping Mission, 55 United Nations Protection Forces, 37 United Nations Resolution 1325, 4 United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 of 2000, 23, 40, 54, 83, 95 United Nations (UN), 15, 17, 20, 25, 35, 47, 68, 82, 87, 95 United Nations (UN) peacekeeping, 37, 60 University of Nicosia, 3 UN Mission, 69 UN Resolution1325, 108 UNSCR 1325, 40, 41, 69, 80–82, 86, 95, 104, 106, 109 V Violence against women, 48 W Women, Peace and Security, 106 Women’s movement, 24 Women’s organizations, 4 Women’s rights, 1, 3