Turkish-Cypriot Nationalist Drive Toward State-Building: Politics, Violence, and Political Economy

Abstract

Scholarly research in northern Cyprus and Turkey, which treats the question of Cyprus from the perspective of the domestic dynamics of the Turkish-Cypriot society, is rather sparse. For the most part, the focal point of theoretical narratives regarding Cyprus is that the problem belongs to the realm of international relations, where the Turkish-Cypriots feature just as a unitary actor. There are a number of authors who highlight this literary deficiency. For instance, Hasguler (2007, pp. 1–3) claims that Cyprus has from the outset been treated as a national question alone in both Turkey and Greece, with the Cypriots as the inept authors of their own history. Similarly, Egemen (2006, pp. 37–39) notes that popular and scholarly literature on the Turkish-Cypriots mostly concentrates on the question of Cyprus, at the expense of domestic politics and economics, ideology, and, particularly, power struggles for leadership.