‘The pawns that they moved here and there’? Microacts, room for manoeuvre, and everyday agency in the 1974 Cyprus conflict
Abstract
Oral testimonies from Greek Cypriots who lived through the Greek dictatorship’s 1974 coup d’état on Cyprus and the subsequent Turkish invasion frequently present the narrators as mere pawns in a macro-scale historical drama, having little to no control over or understanding of the broader events unfolding around them. On one level, this rings true, as individual soldiers and civilians were rarely if ever able to dictate or perceive the broader trajectories of the conflict in which they found themselves. Yet this perspective belies the subtler reality that even in chaotic conditions and under deeply restricted circumstances people exercise agency and create spaces, however small, in which to operate as autonomous agents and to shape their own personal trajectories. Whilst they could not leave the chessboard, these ‘pawns’ actively moved themselves here and there, performing microacts that locally refracted official diktats and ideologies in mutable ways. Moreover, in the construction of their testimonies they assert further agency, assembling these microacts into meaningful narratives by placing them within broader historical frameworks.
Citation
Halstead , H 2022 , ' ‘The pawns that they moved here and there’? Microacts, room for manoeuvre, and everyday agency in the 1974 Cyprus conflict ' , European History Quarterly , vol. 52 , no. 2 , pp. 245-267 . https://doi.org/10.1177/02656914221085123
Publication
European History Quarterly
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0265-6914Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
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