Karayianni, Christiana (2011) The impact of different ways of communication on bicommunal relations in Cyprus. Doctoral thesis (DPhil), University of Sussex.

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Abstract

This thesis examines how the relationship between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot
communities has been shaped by the way the media and related structures mediate their
communication. This is a multi-method study based on data gathered from interview, print,
broadcast and online material offering a new synthesis and analysis of the mediation of a
century of turbulent bicommunal relations.

The thesis begins by developing a theoretical framework to address these questions of
mediation and offers a critical review of the historiography of bicommunal relations on the
island. Three core empirical chapters follow. The first aims to understand the role of faceto-
face communication in bicommunal relations based on interviews with both Greek and
Turkish Cypriots. The second focuses on the representation of the Turkish-Cypriot
community in the Greek-Cypriot print and broadcast media based on textual and discourse
analyses of both extraordinary events and mundane coverage. This empirical study
identifies the shifts of the hegemonic discourses in the Greek-Cypriot public sphere and
the media rituals that are/were enacted in order for the discourses to be legitimised.
Finally, the third chapter analyses samples of online bicommunal communication before
and after the easing of ‘border’ restrictions in 2003. It highlights the ways the new media
can be used to move beyond those media rituals that confirm certain myths and to reenhance the normalisation of bicommunal coexistence.

Overall, the thesis’s findings suggest that the Greek-Cypriot print and broadcast media’s
symbolic power increased in certain historical periods of conflict and that through this
power they territorialised people’s reality and the process of assigning meanings to the other. It should be noted though, that this territorialisation is not homogenous, it is rather a product of conflict among local discourses. Finally, putting together the findings deriving from all three empirical studies leads to the suggestion that new media tools help/ed overcome a territorialisation process and in a sense recapture the dynamics of oral everydayness of the common past of the two Cypriot communities.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Schools and Departments:	School of Media, Arts and Humanities > Media and Film
Subjects:	D History > DF History of Greece > DF701 Modern Greece D History > DR History of Balkan Peninsula > DR0401 Turkey
Depositing User:	Library Cataloguing
Date Deposited:	20 Oct 2011 14:20
Last Modified:	16 Mar 2022 15:50
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/7429

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