This report presents a selection of life stories from people displaced to the southern part of Cyprus at various points during the conflict. This selection aims to reflect the variety of experiences of refugeehood. Drawing on these experiences, the report emphasizes the wide range of interpretations, feelings, discourses, expectations, and individual actions that they have informed over the years, in people’s attempts to reconstruct their lives after the progressive division of the island. In these terms, the aim of the report is not to factually support a particular perspective or course of action, but rather, to evidence the multiplicity of such perspectives and actions. In this sense, the report shows that an eventual settlement of the property issue must be attentive to the wide variety of experiences of loss, and integrate both material and affective senses of restitution.
The report is divided into four parts, which centre around the presentations of life stories in the form of interview summaries, conducted with displaced individuals during the length of the project. It also includes interviews focused on litigation actions following the displacement. This part is considered a crucial section of the report because of the strong focus on litigation in current discussions of the property issue, on the levels of high politics, public discourse and everyday conversation. Overall, it is hoped that the report will enable a fuller appreciation of the complexity of the refugee and property issues, including their linkages and divergences within conceptualizations of displacement.
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