By Rebecca Bryant

Emergent Conversation 18

This essay is part of the series Remnants of Empire, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 18 

On 20 March 2020, a banker’s private jet bounced onto a runway in the northern part of the island of Cyprus. The landing was broadcast live on social media, and anyone watching could feel the collective tension. Only ten days earlier, a German tourist had brought the first case of the COVID-19 virus to the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC), a de facto state that had declared its independence in 1983 but had only gained recognition by Turkey. On the same day as the banker’s flight, the government of this already internationally isolated entity had declared a full lockdown, with transport on or off the island suspended. The flight was of crucial importance, because the medical supplies that Mete Özmerter had flown to Turkey to acquire were in short supply everywhere, with countries outbidding each other for test kits and masks. When the banker climbed from his plane in full personal protective equipment and gave a thumbs up, his Facebook page filled with joyful emojis and expressions of gratitude.

I explore the pandemic period further in a book manuscript that I began revising during the lockdown period (Bryant, N.D.), which I spent in north Cyprus. Then, I became intrigued by the way that the social distancing and isolation of the pandemic mirrored what citizens of unrecognized states have experienced over decades. Even in more ordinary times, Cyprus’s north, like other de facto entities, is under embargo, while other nation-states and international organizations exclude it from treaties, conventions, and even the collection of statistics. During the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other monitoring agencies refused even to keep data about such unrecognized places.

However, despite intense discussions in international media of how distancing would affect the socialities of ordinary people, or how isolation would affect our psychologies, no one seemed especially interested in making the association with the isolating mechanisms imposed on communities like this one. This was because our isolation was not just physical but was also geopolitical, and so was clearly entangled with the production of particular types of knowledge and ignorance. The world knew nothing about what was happening in north Cyprus because the world could know nothing about it. In this instance, “could” indicates both (in)capability and (im)possibility. In other words, north Cyprus’s pariah status had made it a known unknown, a black hole in the international order, where the possibility of knowledge was and is always already foreclosed.

Black Holes of Sovereignty

In her groundbreaking work on the remnants of empire, Ann Stoler (2006) argues that as scholars we should not look for those remains in empires’ former possessions or territories only. Rather, we should seek them in “imperial formations,” “macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation” (128). This echoes a body of literature in the history of international relations that conceives sovereignty as always partial and our current international order as an heir of the imperial order that preceded it (e.g., Benton 2010, Aalberts 2018, Zarakol 2018). In other words, the current international order is intrinsically hierarchical, defined by relations of dependency and states of exception that have colonial precedents.

One such exception is that of de facto states, entities that have broken away from a recognized state but never gained international recognition of their independence and sovereignty. Examples include Abkhazia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the now-defunct LTTE-controlled areas of Sri Lanka, while some scholars place Kosovo, with its limited recognition, in this category. It is notable that such entities have almost always emerged from countries that are the remnants of empire and where the demands of a significant minority have not been met by the postcolonial state. Condemned by the United Nations, they are embargoed and isolated, creating a perception of remoteness. Often, they are described as “places that don’t exist,” a term that geopolitically erases them.

We might compare north Cyprus and other such de facto entities with what Ruben Andersson (2019a) in a recent book describes as a “red zone” or “no-go zone” of the sorts that are today proliferating on world maps. These spaces, he argues, are created through a “global cartopolitics of danger and distance-making,” a geopolitics of differentiation that makes even close spaces seem remote from us, and moreover seem that they should stay that way (Andersson 2019b, 305).

While the metaphor of the black hole certainly invokes such a geopolitics of differentiation, the difference between “red zones” and “black holes” is that the former rely on knowledge, the latter on ignorance. While red zones are “hot,” “edgy,” and need to be known in order to preserve the center, the spaces often called black holes tend to be erased or obscured on maps, part of an isolation that is physical, geopolitical, and epistemic. In everyday life, that isolation takes the form of economic and political embargoes. However, that isolation is also entangled with the production of particular types of knowledge and ignorance. Because of non-recognition, other states refuse to see them, to interact with them, and the U.N. and other bodies keep no official statistics on them. These are spaces and people that cannot be known, because they should not be seen or acknowledged.

Unpacking Isolation in a Pariah State

In the 1980s, Edwin Ardener (2012[1987]) attempted to theorize remoteness, observing that remote places are ones that seem distant even when we arrive there. And in a prescient statement of pandemic-era dilemmas, Saxer and Andersson (2019, 141) summarize Andener’s argument as saying that places that we see as remote are not so because of actual physical remoteness but because of “a structural relationship of social distancing.” Saxer and Andersson (2019) build on Ardener’s observations in noting that the etymology of “remote” is the Latin removere, to remove. They comment, “This helps us to see remoteness as a transitive action set within the domains of terrain and power: ‘lifting’, dis-placing and perhaps mis-placing an inhabited area and reshaping the social space around it” (144).

This remark certainly applies to unrecognized states, though rather than displaced or misplaced, it would be more appropriate to say that they are cartopolitically erased from the world order. The idea that these are “places that don’t exist” reflects the discursive efforts of the so-called parent states—the states from which they broke away—to deny their reality. Terms such as “pirates,” “pariahs,” or “rogues” also indicate a space outside the cartopolitical order of nation-states, deviant outcasts of the “international community.” Moreover, unlike the international, “hands-on” and interventionist response in “red zones,” where knowledge gained through satellites and drones feeds military operations intended to create a new “normal,” de facto states experience a “hands-off” approach in which “normalization” is always a project for the future. While “red zones” are marked by ongoing violence, black holes are the frozen remnants of longstanding conflicts. They’re not bothering anyone, so why bother with them?

Paradoxically, though, the label “places that do not exist” has the effect of making these places into a somewhere, rather than a nowhere. Some scholars have noted, for instance, that the effect of international censure and sanctions may undermine their aim, in that sanctions already acknowledge a state that must be acted against, hence giving such states “a sovereign shape, if not a sovereign status” (White 2009, 154). Certainly, sanctions and censure point to a status quo that has a stubborn reality. Even calling such states “pirates” or “rogues” has the effect of giving them a “body,” making them an international “person,” even if that person is a pariah. Abandonment and exceptionality define their “whereness.”

The black hole metaphor, however, also induces fear—of the unknown, of disappearance inside it. Indeed, despite the lack of violence and often considerable stability, what makes these entities isolated, remote, and known unknowns is that they are usually labeled as “occupied,” marking them with the stigma of violence. The occupation label is a way of describing varying degrees of dependency on what are usually called “patron states,” larger powers that for reasons of history or ethnic kinship are willing to help the secessionist entity. In the case of the TRNC, that patron state is Turkey, while in the case of Abkhazia or South Ossetia it is Russia. I should note that labeling such entities as occupied is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the isolation that results makes them increasingly dependent on a patron to give them access to the world (see Bryant 2012; Bryant and Hatay 2020).

Elsewhere, I discuss the “puppet/pirate dilemma” that results, one in which such entities can only be described as “puppets” of a larger power or as “pirates” of the international order (Bryant N.D.). In either case, citizens of such entities appear to have a problem of will—either too much of it, or none at all. While the puppet metaphor suggests an empty shell that can be filled with another’s will, the pirate image suggests a figure with too much will, or the wrong kind of will, who in this case willfully makes off with part of a sovereign state. Rogue states, pariah states—whatever one’s choice of metaphor, each implies the “wrong” type of will in relation to the international order, though the metaphors themselves often contradict each other.

The trope of “occupation” is centrally important in producing such spaces as dark, inaccessible, and unknowable, “no-go zones” that are also “no-know zones.” Like the event horizon of a black hole, knowledge ends at the point that one enters it. As a result, the pirate/puppet/occupied state becomes a space about which the same tropes are repeated again and again as though in the form of new knowledge, a space “subjected to a central black hole divesting it of its heuristic and ambulatory capacities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 22). Any divergence from these particular ways of casting such entities is immediately labeled ideological or propaganda, and in turn sucked into the black hole of non-meaning that insists on static understandings.

Nevertheless, within such spaces of political and economic abandonment people must go on with their lives and find ways to get by. It is here where economies of abandonment come into play, and isolation appears as a scarce resource in an ever-more-interconnected world. On the one hand, the sense of danger makes these entities attractive for travelers interested in dark tourism. On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, those living in unrecognized states become like the “undiscovered” indigenous peoples that Lucas Bessire (2012) notes are defined through a “refusal of relation,” through the supposed choice to isolate. Although the isolation of a place like north Cyprus is, in fact, a denial of relation rather than a refusal, the lack of relation with the rest of the world makes such places appear “frozen” in a long-term conflict, temporally suspended in a moment of abandonment. Travel brochures often appeal to the desire for the remote and undiscovered, touting them as “untouched paradises,” like “stepping back in time” (Bryant and Hatay 2020). When remoteness becomes profitable, even outcasts of the world system may learn to enjoy their exceptionalism (Bryant and Hatay 2011).

On the Perils and Joys of Abandonment

It is here that we may return to the pandemic period. In the beginning, public panic was fed by unanswered questions. Where would we get ventilators? And PCR tests? What if the virus got out of control and the already crippled health system was overwhelmed? Would anyone help out? Would we be left to die?

At first, there was public panic. This was why Özmerter’s ten flights to bring medical supplies not only produced a sigh of relief but also a sense of self-sufficiency, making isolation seem like a cocoon. Once two weeks had passed, then three, without a single new case, many people began to discuss how to sustain the economy while continuing their isolation. Let’s hunker down, keep the borders closed, and hope for it all to end, was the idea. People had the living memory of siege solidarity from the conflict period of the 1960’s (Bryant and Hatay 2011), so we knew that even if living standards declined, we could still survive.

“When you live in a place like this,” a friend remarked to me during that time, “the only weapon in your arsenal is isolation.” Although the government’s response was chaotic and the televised gaffes of the bumbling Minister of Health quickly became the stuff of viral memes, people gradually began to feel empowered as day after day the minister announced that there were no new cases. In the last days before borders began to open again, there was even a brief period when our local lockdown ended, beaches and restaurants were full, people spilled into the streets, and the bars shook with concerts and dancing. Still isolated at that point, it was possible to enjoy one’s exception, to experience the sociality of isolation (see Bryant and Hatay 2011; 2020; also Dzenovska and Arenas 2012).

Ignorance and Geopolitical Inattention

Stoler (2008) urges us to reorder our attention regarding imperialism to the uneven distribution of rights in our current global order (193). The example above compels us to consider how part of the imperial legacy is the uneven distribution of geopolitical attention, rooted in the violent policing of categories that insists spaces like north Cyprus be unknown and unknowable and remain that way.

Whether we call them pirates, puppets, rogues, or pariahs, the categories through which we know such entities invariably label them as unbecoming subjects (see also Bryant 2021), ones who insist on the wrong sort of will and so will remain the inscrutable and disordered objects of geopolitical inattention. Like the cartoon above, such unbecoming subjects remind us of the etymological relationship between “ignore” and “ignorance” and the politics of our own epistemology.

Rebecca Bryant is professor and holder of the Chair in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. She is also a visiting professor at the European Institute of the London School of Economics (LSE). Bryant is an anthropologist of politics and law focusing on the ethnography of the state, particularly ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in Turkey. She has long-term research interests in temporality, memory, and historical reconciliation and has investigated these topics through research in Cyprus and Turkey. For the past decade, she has researched everyday life in unrecognized states, adding to her Cyprus research preliminary investigations in Abkhazia. Her most recent works include The Anthropology of the Future (Cambridge, 2019) with Daniel M. Knight; Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State (Pennsylvania, 2020) with Mete Hatay, and The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination Beyond the State (Cornell, 2021), co-edited with Madeleine Reeves. Her latest work, Lives in Limbo: Syrian Youth in Turkey (with Amal Abdalla, Maissam Nimer, and Ayşen Üstübici), will be published by in 2024 with Berghahn Books.

Works Cited

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