Resolving Cyprus: New Approaches to Conflict Resolution.

• Author: Dilek, Esra
• Position: Book review

Resolving Cyprus: New Approaches to Conflict Resolution

Edited by James Ker-Lindsay

London-New York: IB Tauris, 2014, 279 pages, $28.00, ISBN: 9781784534783

Despite four decades of multi-level and multi-actor efforts to find a solution, Cyprus remains an intractable conflict and a case of analysis for scholars of conflict resolution. Resolving Cyprus: New Approaches to Conflict Resolution edited by James Ker-Lindsay is part of the academic endeavour to understand the reasons behind this intractability. More specifically, as Ker-Lindsay notes in the Introduction, the book is based on a single, deceptively simple question: can Cyprus be solved? --a question that has brought together a great variety of answers based on a variety of approaches to the problem and the conflict itself. As simple as it is, exploring answers to this question from different angles is crucial for making sense of any possible pathways that might lead to the solution of the decades-long Cyprus Problem.

The book is composed of 30 short essays (8-10 pages each) organized alphabetically by author. The structure of the book offers one major advantage and one major disadvantage for the reader. The advantage is that short essays provide concise and to-the-point opinion pieces addressing the main question of the book, i.e. the question of whether Cyprus can be solved. Reading through the essays, the reader is able to capture the multidimensional nature of the conflict and accordingly, the complexity of a possible solution, without getting lost in details in each essay. However, at the same time, this structuring brings together a major disadvantage. The absence of any thematic ordering or grouping of the essays forms one main practical difficulty for the reader who is confused in obtaining a thematic understanding of how the conflict can be solved. This limitation is partially addressed in the last part of the Introduction, where Ker-Lindsay provides a thematic organization of the essays under the title 'scope of the contributions.' However, the reader is still left jumping from one issue area to another while reading the essays in alphabetical order. Based on this consideration, the rest of this review is based on a thematic organization of the essays.

The first theme emerging from the essays is that of history. As with every conflict, history matters; the essays by An, Asmussen, and Mohamad focus on the importance of historical legacies in shaping the division today, arguing...