Reflections from a Field-Course

‘What do you associate with Cyprus?’ we ask at the beginning of the semester, as a new group of undergraduate geography students starts preparing for our field-class trip to the island. Reluctantly, one or two hands go up: ‘Halloumi’ and ‘Ayia Napa’ tend to get mentioned before anyone refers to the decades-long division of the country or the British colonial legacy. That, thankfully, changes as the semester progresses, and the thirty Newcastle University students learn more about the complex history of external influence and internal division, and reflect on how Cyprus might move beyond this.

We begin teaching with a lecture on a brief history of the conflict. Purporting to be ‘objective,’ one lecturer essentially recounts a pro-Greek retelling of the island as culturally Hellenic since ancient times, only cruelly prised from the European motherland by the nefarious Turks and British. As students scribble or type away, at a pre-arranged moment the other lecturer stands up and shouts their colleague down for trying to pass off Greek propaganda as unbiased history. Students are alarmed that their lecturers are apparently having a public argument, until they realise (with smiles of relief) that this is just play acting. They then settle back down to take notes as the second lecturer goes over the same material presenting the same dates and events, but this time from a stylised Turkish perspective: a multi-cultural Middle Eastern society torn apart by Greek nationalists and grasping British imperialists.

This is an intentionally-jarring way of teaching, mirroring the types of incommensurable nationalist claims that permeate life in the island. It sets up the rest of the course, which focusses on how we can move beyond these stark narratives. Geography explores how different groups of people make competing claims over the same territory, imbuing it with different meanings. Because such contests over space are dynamic, emotional, and imprinted onto landscapes, the attempt to understand them from the desk or archive alone is necessarily limited. That is why we run a field class, which we have been doing for nearly a decade in Cyprus where we have developed long-running contacts, friendships, and collaborations.

Mirroring the contested narratives approach adopted in lectures, on day one of the trip the students visit the foreign ministries of both the internationally-recognised Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (TRNC), the latter only recognised by Turkey. They hear slick but sharply contrasting diagnoses of why the division occurred.

On day two we help the students think beyond these narratives by introducing them to groups who are trying to move past this division, including the UN, academics, bicommunal activists, and peacebuilding NGOs. Evening debriefs help the students process these often-disorientating experiences. The students then spend the remainder of the week collecting and analysing data for group projects they have designed themselves. Each of these is unique, but all share a focus on political geography’s core theme of how we divide or share space. In so doing, they tell us something about how the legacies of the Lausanne Treaty are still playing out today in often overlooked and surprising ways.

The trip also encourages students to reflect on Britian’s colonial past. The British Empire leased Cyprus from the Ottomans in the 1878 Cyprus Convention. Britain annexed the island at the outbreak of war in 1914. Article 20 of the Lausanne Treaty stated that ‘Turkey hereby recognises the annexation of Cyprus proclaimed by the British Government on the 5th November, 1914.’ Importantly but perhaps unsurprisingly, at no point were Cypriots themselves consulted: Cyprus was too important in British geopolitical thinking for that. As British Prime Minister Anthony Eden put it candidly in 1956 following the Suez Canal debacle: ‘no Cyprus – no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil – unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as simple as that.’

Historically, the island’s main social cleavages were along religious lines, Muslim and Christian. Under the later years of British rule before independence in 1960, these identities became increasingly ethnicised as ‘Turkish’ and ‘Greek.’ A Greek Cypriot campaign for ‘Enosis’ (unification) with Greece led to a violent anti-British insurgency, and a Turkish Cypriot nationalism developed in response. The Republic of Cyprus’ constitution was a creative attempt to manage these tensions by establishing a dual-language, bi-communal republic, with Greece, Turkey, and the UK remaining its ‘guarantors.’

This arrangement rapidly broke down into intercommunal violence, and in 1964 the Security Council mandated a UN peacekeeping force to keep the warring sides apart. A decade later, Turkish military forces landed on Cyprus in what Greek narratives portray as an illegal invasion, but what Turkish accounts defend as a legitimate action by a guarantor power to uphold the constitution and protect Turkish Cypriots in the face of escalating violence following a Greek fascist coup on the island. It precipitated mass population exchanges reminiscent of those between Greece and Turkey mandated by Lausanne half a century earlier. The UN force – the longest-standing UN peacekeeping mission in the world – established and continues to police a buffer zone between the two communities that cuts the capital, Nicosia, in half. Despite repeated attempts to achieve reunification there has been little progress since a 2004 plan under UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was rejected in a referendum. Today, people can move between both sides for work or leisure, and no one has been killed in the conflict since 1996. But with no sign of progress towards reunification it has become the archetypal frozen conflict.

Upon returning to Newcastle, students reflected on where they found hope: perhaps not at governmental level, but rather amongst islanders whose narratives emphasise centuries of coexistence, whilst also recognising division. We are delighted to be able to share some of these insights in a series of blog posts, authored by second- and third-year undergraduate students, about their projects in Cyprus.

How the island can move beyond this is what has come to be referred to as the ‘Cyprus question’ – one that outsiders have repeatedly attempted to answer, but without success. As the students on our field-course soon discovered, it cannot straightforwardly be ‘answered’ by one intervention or another. Nevertheless, upon returning to Newcastle, some students reflected on where they found hope: perhaps not at the state or international scales, but rather amongst islanders whose narratives recognise centuries of coexistence and how that might translate into future political realities.

We are delighted to be able to share some of these insights in this collection of blog posts, authored by second- and third-year undergraduate students about their projects in Cyprus. Although each group’s research project was different, they all shared a focus on the ‘Cyprus question’ today, and in so doing, tell us also something about the legacies of the Lausanne Treaty on the divided island.

MAIN IMAGE: HAWKER SIDDELEY JET ON THE TARMAC AT NICOSIA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. THE LAST AIRCRAFT TO LAND IN 1974 AS TURKISH TROOPS INVADED. COURTESY NICK MEGORAN. LEDRA STREET IMAGE JULES VERNE TIMES TWO, PPL1-CORRECTED.

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