Suchergebnisse

Why do some societies choose to adopt federal settlements in the face of acute ethnic conflict, while others do not? Neophytos Loizides examines how acrimoniously divided Cyprus could re-unify by adopting a federal and consociational arrangement inspiring similar attempts in its region.Loizides asserts that institutional innovation is key in designing peace processes. Analyzing power-sharing in Northern Ireland, the return of displaced persons in Bosnia, and the preparatory mandate referendum in South Africa, he shows how divided societies have implemented novel solutions despite conditions that initially seemed prohibitive. Turning to Cyprus, he chronicles the breakthrough that led to the exhumations of the missing after 2003, and observes that a society's choice of narratives and institutions can overcome structural constraints. While Loizides points to the relative absence of successful federal and consociational arrangements among societies evolving from the "post-Ottoman space," he argues that neither elites nor broader societies in the region must be held hostages to the past.To effect lasting and positive change, Loizides encourages stakeholders in divided societies to be prepared to identify, redesign, and implement innovative new institutions. Examining successful peace mediations and identifying the shared experience and commonalities between Cyprus and other divided societies promises not only to inform the tackling of the Cyprus problem but also to provide transferable knowledge with broader implications for the fields of peace studies and conflict resolution.

This article examines the effects of elite framing on conflict transformation. It utilises debates from the Turkish Grand National Assembly as the main source of empirical evidence and demonstrates the differences in the way Turkish parliamentarians framed national and foreign policy issues in the 1990s. (Parliamentary Affairs)

Relating nationalism to other ideologies or cultural value systems is an enigmatic scholarly activity. The enigma lies in the kaleidoscopic nature of nationalism and the ease with which it adapts to philosophically opposed ideologies. Nationalism, for instance, often assumes ties to liberalism, even though it presupposes a strong commitment to a national community that transcends individualism. It accommodates conservatism fairly well despite nationalism's modernizing mission, and it has often been paired with communism, regardless of the latter's internationalist rhetoric. Finally, nationalism and religion often go hand in hand, despite their deep philosophical incompatibilities and asymmetries. For example, nationalist ideologies often encourage violence against outgroup members even where religious doctrines strictly prohibit physical force. Inherently local, philosophically poor, and limited in scope or outreach, nationalism lacks a belief in afterlife salvation or in creative intelligence as source of meaning behind the universe. Yet it frequently dominates identity construction, overshadowing the primacy of Christianity or Islam which are universal in their message of salvation.

This article compares the processes of foreign policymaking in Greece and Turkey in order to examine why the incentives and pressures of the enlargement process have failed until now to initiate a settlement in the Cyprus bicommunal negotiations. While most studies on the Cyprus problem have focused on the two communities of the island, little attention has been paid to the policies of the two `motherlands', namely Greece and Turkey. Yet their leverage on the two Cypriot communities and their conflicting expectations with regard to an enlarged Europe in the Eastern Mediterranean constitute a complex security puzzle. The Republic of Cyprus stands as a champion candidate member for the next enlargement, amid fears of Turkish reprisals and hopes for a political settlement on the island. With the benefits of settlement overwhelming the benefits of any other alternative, it is paradoxical that the parties seem to be about to fail to reach a last-minute, mutually beneficial compromise. I try to resolve this paradox by supplementing rational choice theory with cognitivist theories of international relations. While rational choice predicts a direct relationship between external environment and foreign policy shifts, the case of Cyprus suggests that this relationship is actually indirect. Without understanding how the external environment is framed in the domestic political discourse of Greece and Turkey, it is impossible to demonstrate how outside pressure and incentives affect foreign policy shifts.