Cyprus and the Roadmap for Peace: A Critical Interrogation of the Conflict.

• Author: Colakoglu, Emre Feyzi

Cyprus and the Roadmap for Peace: A Critical Interrogation of the Conflict

By Michalis S. Michael and Yucel Vural

Glos: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2018, 296 pages, $125, ISBN: 9781786430489

Michalis S. Michael and Yucel Vural's edited volume of Cyprus and the Roadmap for Peace: A Critical Interrogation of the Conflict has its roots in a peace project awarded in 2014 by the Istanbul-based Journalists and Writers Foundation. Therefore, the book is a product of a research project and a conflict resolution initiative, and accordingly has descriptive and analytical characteristics. Michael and Vural bring together twenty-one authors -academicians, politicians, and journalists--to produce a theoretical, empirical, and normative study about the ongoing Cyprus dispute.

The book consists of five parts and nineteen chapters. The first two chapters establish the discursive lens of the book. The editors define the logic, structure, and innovation of the book in the first chapter. In the second chapter, Michael and Hadjipavlou, approach the Cyprus conflict within the framework of a conflict resolution perspective. After indicating the place of the Cyprus dispute in the conflict resolution literature, they investigate the impact of citizen-level diplomacy between communities, a factor which has been overlooked by analysts, diplomats, and policymakers.

The second part of the book focuses on the historical and geographical narrative of the conflict from both the Turkish and Greek perspectives. Altug Gunal and Nikos Moudouros seek to explain the significance of Cyprus for Turkish foreign policy with respect to its historical, geographical, and economic dimensions in consecutive chapters. In the fifth chapter, Yucel Vural, Sertac Sonan, and Michalis Michael offer an analysis for the Turkish Cypriot dilemma, as it struggles to deal with both Turkey and Greek Cypriots at the same time. The last chapter of this part explains the historical role of Greece in the Cyprus dispute. After clarifying the perceptions and misperceptions of Greece in the Cyprus peace process, Alexis Heraclides suggests a more constructive role for Greece.

The third part of the book explores the new roles and engagements of the Cyprus conflict. In the seventh chapter, Basak Ekenoglu and Neophytos Lozides interrogate the Cyprus dispute by bringing together three interrelated aspects of the conflict, which they elaborate as the refugee, settler/immigrant, and diaspora questions. They...