Content area
Full text
Abstract
As a response to the call of the global Occupy Movement in 2011, a number of people occupied the Cypriot no-man's land in the UN-controlled Buffer Zone of the capital Nicosia, a space that has historically divided the two ethnic communities, in the old part of town since the late 1950s. The re-insertion of human life on the border, in the midst of derelict buildings, barbed wire and under the watchful eyes of contesting sovereignties came under scrutiny and was contested by various actors in 2011 and 2012. The article is an ethnographic study of the Occupy Buffer Zone (OBZ) movement, which explores these contestations. It traces the development of OBZ from a small anti-authoritarian group to a movement that momentarily gained the support of various anti-establishment and anti-capitalist groups and individuals and its eventual dissolution after a violent police raid. In doing so it shows how a space for alternative politics was opened up, as well as the limits that claim to space hit upon.
Keywords: Occupy movement, Cyprus, Buffer Zone, resistance, sovereignty, animal-human, anti-authoritarianism, anarchists, property
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
Introduction
Wiring about the Occupy movement in Cyprus, known as Occupy Buffer Zone (OBZ) is a complex task for a number of reasons: the most important of these being that my association with it did not develop out of a preformed academic interest. I became involved in the movement as a member of an anti-authoritarian group that found itself at the centre of OBZ's development. At the same time, as a student of property rights and sovereignty in Cyprus I could not help but think critically about the struggles and negotiations that unfolded around OBZ during the eight months of its survival, from October 2011 to May 2012. Often, in previous studies, I found myself 'seeing like a state' (Scott 1998), that is to say, thinking about the aims of particular state policies and trying to understand the means through which they have been pursued in the context of Cypriot 'modernisation and the conflicts that it entailed. This meant, for example, deciphering the classifications of OBZ along ethnic, class, gender, and other structures of division which members of the movement strove to dispense with. Being perceived as a 'marginal'1...