Bilkent University Department of Political Science and Public Administration
POLS TALKS announces,
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*The Ambiguities of Domination: On Turkey’s Cyprus Problem*
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This paper proposes some categories to help us understand Turkey’s presence in north Cyprus, which has been variously described as that of an occupying power, a colonizer, a protector, and a patron state. In the terms now used by the European Court of Human Rights, north Cyprus is Turkey’s “subordinate authority.”Although Turkey is accused of exercising political hegemony in the island’s north, Turkish Cypriots enjoy a multi-party democracy that rates well on Freedom House’s democratic index. How, then, should we describe and understand this incomplete and ambiguous domination? Using long-term ethnographic research and a recent series of interviews with opinion-shapers in the island, the paper proposes that the north Cyprus-Turkey relationship reveals as much about the problems of de facto statecraft as it does about the specific relationship between the island’s north and its protector. Using examples from other de facto states, the presentation argues that recent tensions in the relationship in fact help us understand the strain of sovereignty under the pressure of global capital.
The lecture will be held by Dr. Rebecca Bryant from London School of Economics on Thursday, 2 April 2015, 1.00 p.m. in room T-271.