This book analyzes the events that impacted the structure and competitive processes of the two dominant Cypriot political factions while under the watchful eye of British rule. Based on new archival research, Alecou addresses the social and political environment in which the Cypriot Communists and Nationalists fought each other while at the same time had to fight the British Empire. The differences between communists and nationalists brought the two sides to a frontal collision in the wake of the events of the Greek civil war. The class conflict within Cypriot society would at some point inevitably lead, in one way or another, to a clash between the two factions. The civil war in Greece constituted another field of conflict between Left and Right, accelerating the formation of a bipolar party system in which the vertical division of the Greek community in Cyprus eventually expressed itself.

As Cyprus experienced British imperial rule between 1878 and 1960, Greek and Turkish nationalism on the island developed at different times and at different speeds. Relations between Turkish Cypriots and the British on the one hand, and Greek Cypriots and the British on the other, were often asymmetrical with the Muslim community undergoing an enormous change in terms of national/ethnic identity and class characteristics. Turkish Cypriot nationalism developed belatedly as a militant nationalist and anti-Enosis movement. This book explores the relationship between the emergence of Turkish national identity and British colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s.

This book explores the different perspectives and historical moments of nationalism in Cyprus. It does this by looking at nationalism as a form of identity, as a form of ideology, and as a form of politics. The fifteen contributors to this book are scholars of different scientific backgrounds and present Cypriot nationalisms from an interdisciplinary framework, including approaches such as history, political science, psychology, and gender studies. The chapters take a historical approach to nationalism and argue that the world of nations, ethnic identity, and national ideology are neither eternal, nor ahistorical nor primordial, but are rather socially constructed and function within particular historical and social contexts. As a land that was, and still is, marked by opposed nationalisms – that is, Greek and Turkish – Cyprus constitutes a fertile ground for examining the history, the dynamics, and the dialectics of nationalism.

This book explores the assassination of Antonios Triantafyllides, a leading Cypriot lawyer and politician, in British colonial Cyprus in January 1934. This event has been the infamous subject of rumours since its occurrence and a taboo subject for Cypriot society and historians alike, as the event has been silenced or dismissed. This book explores the assassination in its broadest possible context by situating it within the broader events within the British Empire, the region and the world more generally at that time. The basis for the exploration is a ‘community of records’ through which all the evidence is sifted, reading it both with and against the grain, in order to provide the most likely answer to who was really behind this mysterious cold case. Through rigorous analysis, this book concludes that those who most likely masterminded the assassination supported radical right-wing extremist pro-enosis nationalism and were subsequently also prominent in forming the EOKA terrorist group in the 1950s.

This book uncovers the contradictions and convergences of racism, decolonisation, migration and living international relations that were shaped by the shift from colonialism to postcolonialism and from nationalism to transnationalism between the 1950s and the present. It takes up the story of Nicholaos Charalambou Kanaris, a colonial migrant to the UK from Cyprus, as a reflection on how the everyday lives of minor figures offer an unexplored window into international relations. The research uncovers and offers insight into the complexities and messiness of everyday life and of (trans)national identities as they are lived and have been lived at the heart of imperial, colonial and postcolonial systems and processes. The innovative methodological approach adopts memoirs gathered through a series of life-narrative interviews and is guided by theories of minor transnationalism that look to foreground horizontal relations between minor figures. Various themes of international relations are examined through the lens of Nicholaos’ story and his family life, including colonialism, geopolitics, citizenship, security, migration and transnationalism. Examining how these themes play out in everyday life permits his practice and lived experience to theorise the international politics of colonialism, migration and citizenship. This book argues that Politics and International Relations can benefit from a transnational approach and offers a method of theory-in-practice for exploring the everyday experience of transnationalism, through the methodology of life-narrative and memoir.

Bahriye Kemal's ground-breaking new work serves as the first study of the literatures of Cyprus from a postcolonial and partition perspective. Her book explores Anglophone, Hellenophone and Turkophone writings from the 1920s to the present. Drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan’s humanistic geography and Henri Lefebvre’s Marxist philosophy, Kemal proposes a new interdisciplinary spatial model, at once theoretical and empirical, that demonstrates the power of space and place in postcolonial partition cases. The book shows the ways that place and space determine identity so as to create identifications; together these places, spaces and identifications are always in production. In analysing practices of writing, inventing, experiencing, reading, and construction, the book offers a distinct ‘solidarity’ that captures the ‘truth of space’ and place for the production of multiple-mutable Cypruses shaped by and for multiple-mutable selves, ending in a 'differential’ Cyprus, Mediterranean, and world. Writing Cyprus offers not only a nuanced understanding of the actual and active production of colonialism, postcolonialism and partition that dismantles the dominant binary legacy of historical-political deadlock discourse, but a fruitful model for understanding other sites of conflict and division

This history of colonial legacies in UN peacekeeping operations from 1945–1971 reveals how United Nations peacekeeping staff reconfigured the functions of global governance and sites of diplomatic power in the post-war world. Despite peacekeeping operations being criticised for their colonial underpinnings, our understanding of the ways in which colonial actors and ideas influenced peacekeeping practices on the ground has been limited and imprecise. In this multi-archival history, Margot Tudor investigates the UN's formative armed missions and uncovers the officials that orchestrated a reinvention of colonial-era hierarchies for Global South populations on the front lines of post-colonial statehood. She demonstrates how these officials exploited their field-based access to perpetuate racial prejudices, plot political interference, and foster protracted inter-communal divisions in post-colonial conflict contexts. Bringing together histories of humanitarianism, decolonisation, and the Cold War, Blue Helmet Bureaucrats sheds new light on the mechanisms through which sovereignty was negotiated and re-negotiated after 1945.

This text presents an overview of the major events and people that have shaped world politics since the end of the Second World War in 1945, including the Cold War, the fall of communism and the ascendancy of the nuclear powers.

By the end of World War II, strategists in Washington and London looked ahead to a new era in which the United States shouldered global responsibilities and Britain concentrated its regional interests more narrowly. The two powers also viewed the Muslim world through very different lenses. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how Anglo-American perceptions of geography shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia. Aiyaz Husain shows that American and British postwar strategy drew on popular notions of geography as well as academic and military knowledge. Once codified in maps and memoranda, these perspectives became foundations of foreign policy. In South Asia, American officials envisioned an independent Pakistan blocking Soviet influence, an objective that outweighed other considerations in the contested Kashmir region. Shoring up Pakistan meshed perfectly with British hopes for a quiescent Indian subcontinent once partition became inevitable. But serious differences with Britain arose over America's support for the new state of Israel. Viewing the Mediterranean as a European lake of sorts, U.S. officials--even in parts of the State Department--linked Palestine with Europe, deeming it a perfectly logical destination for Jewish refugees. But British strategists feared that the installation of a Jewish state in Palestine could incite Muslim ire from one corner of the Islamic world to the other. As Husain makes clear, these perspectives also influenced the Dumbarton Oaks Conference and blueprints for the UN Security Council and shaped French and Dutch colonial fortunes in the Levant and the East Indies.