Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State by Rebecca Bryant and Mete Hatay (review)

After the intellectual decline of the ethnonationalist methodologies that marked much of the work on Cyprus from the 1970s to the 1990s,¹ a new wave of scholarship has appeared. The "aporias" (p. 3) produced by the many contradictions of Cyprus's independence, war, the "Cyprus Problem," the peace process, statehood, and identity have become a central motif. The authors of Sovereignty Suspended have been closely involved with the development of this new wave, which is far more critically substantial, more creative and broadly innovative, and indeed experimental. Methodological innovation helps tease out the epistemological paradoxes of everyday life in a contested state. It is in line with the multidisciplinary, critical emancipatory project that is in search for new sites since it has been freed from the Eurocentric Enlightenment. The work of this study's two authors spans the Cyprus divides, as they also span methods, and disciplines.

Yet, such contributions also rest on the vast bedrock of mainstream, rationalist, and positivist accounts of local power struggles and regional geopolitics, which seem in general to produce descriptive or prescriptive accounts (meaning they are infused with power or avoid it), rather than such pluralist, critical-emancipatory accounts. Under such conditions, identifying these paradoxes may keep the critical project alive, but can they emancipate given that they are founded upon power structures that deny them? An "aporetic state," it appears, represents not an emancipation from conflict but merely a pause in its translation from one epistemological era to the next.

As I write this review, there is yet another political crisis on and around Cyprus and subsequent talk of war—partly caused by the constant repetition of absurd, preponderant geopolitical, perhaps legalistic, and ethno-nationalist narratives—maneuvering in local elections. Yet there is also a possible reopening of the intercommunal peace process under the auspices of the United Nations and, simultaneously, innovative books such as the one under review being published.

The reductive approach to life and politics on the island is a peculiar trait that puts nationalism and the century-old (or older) projects of self-determination or irredentism, before the lived experience of its inhabitants. It has placed an exoticized mono-identity supposedly connected to the land and the state above social and performative elements of sovereignty (p. 14), though it is also being challenged in "real time" by advocacy for a more sophisticated view, which is being conducted in academic quarters, certain wings of government, social media, activism by nongovernmental organizations, and news reporting. To some degree, this latter, alternative discourse to nationalism and geopolitics reflects research such as in this study in its many paradoxes, including how social agency "disappears" and reappears even as it is exercised in a dual mode of power and victimhood (pp. 74, 215). It has never been enough to affect what might be described as revolutionary change in the state system (it has been barely effective even in the state itself), even in some of its more absurdist forms, as this study ultimately illustrates, however. While it has not overturned the dinosaurs of political power that shape the epistemologies of state formation, it has still undefinable significance, which the authors of this study—along with many others—are now grappling with.

The traditional disciplinary methodologies that have normally been deployed in the debates on Cyprus often appear to descend into a circular abyss of a defense of the indefensible (war, nationalism, sovereignty, dispossession, occupation, etc.) in order to preserve what remains of existing power structures. The aporetic state allows them some legitimacy, ironically. In an area generally dominated by methodological nationalism or liberalism, this study pushes at such chinks of light in the fortress of state formation. It is supported by what might be called a methodological everyday-ism, which has unearthed a long series of hidden evidence and dynamics, incidents, contradictions, and injustices in the context of scholarship on Cyprus, in the recent history in the north...