Living archives and Cyprus: militarized masculinities and decolonial emerging world horizons

ABSTRACT

Huddled within the most influential theorisations and praxes of war and violence are imaginations of collating masculinities, texts and their embodiments. Interpreting and reading my mother as a non-dominant body, and her stories about war, violence, and Cyprus as re-iterative corporeal insights and practices challenging such toxic masculinities, I argue that such performances and embodiments (what I call living archives), albeit with multiple tensions, re-orient us to emerging decolonial horizons. In doing so, I directly challenge and unsuture the complacent IR historiographies of security and war and the ways they insist on composing and writing by bringing together certain archives (i.e., images of violent places and state documents) and silencing those which systematically and consistently point to modernity’s violent frameworks including their production of violent masculinities on which extinguishment and futures lie. Such an insistence colludes with certain toxic regimes of representation expecting certain subjects, sovereigns, and institutions to order and reiterate (produce) colonial and violent racialized masculine (and racialized feminized) practices between ourselves and the world. Living archives are also those invented signs, imaginations, and excesses that press materiality and its impasses (i.e., in the form of capture, blackness, non-genders, etc. and resolution of signs and fictions), exposing the limits of modernity’s fictioning, and against any resolution and labor that produces violence all the while sublating it.

KEYWORDS:

• Militarized masculinities
• international relations grammars
• Cyprus
• living archives
• the colonial
• imperial wars
• decolonial struggles

Acknowledgements

This piece is dedicated to my mother whose commitment to struggles for self-determination is unwavering. Special credit goes to Harry Anastasiou for our many conversations on nationalism and war. A special thank you also to Kyle D. Killian, Amanda Chisholm, Joanna Tidy and Elizabeth Thompson for their editing suggestions and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Special credit goes to Harry Anastasiou for our conversations on nationalism and war.

2. This slogan was mobilized by the Republic of Cyprus against the invasion and territorial conquest by Turkey of 40% of the island.