The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is the site of enduring political, military, and economic conflict. This interdisciplinary collection takes Cyprus as a geographical, cultural and political point of reference for understanding how conflict is mediated, represented, reconstructed, experienced, and transformed. Through methodologically diverse case studies of a wide range of topics—including public art, urban spaces, and print, broadcast and digital media—it assembles an impressively multifaceted perspective, one that provides broad insights into the complex interplay of culture, conflict, and identity.

Vaia Doudaki is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media of Uppsala University. Her research focuses on representations, identities, and discourse in media. Her most recent work on the current economic crisis has been published in journals such as Journalism, European Journal of Communication and Javnost – The Public.

Nico Carpentier is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media of Uppsala University, Associate Professor in the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Docent at Charles University in Prague. His latest book is The Discursive-Material Knot: Cyprus in Conflict and Community Media Participation.

“Doudaki and Carpentier’s book brings together essays from disparate disciplines to provide readers with a new and refreshing way of looking at this ongoing conflict…[It] makes a significant contribution to the literature, offering a creative, fresh perspective on Cyprus, focusing on the split between the symbolic and the material and how these contrast when trying to make sense of conflict dynamics. The wide variety of voices, which are all brought under a strong theme of symbols, conflict, and identity, offer the reader, especially social psychologists, an important case study.” • Peace & Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

“While the empirical focus of this book is on the specific context of a divided Cyprus, the authors address a set of issues that extend much further. At the heart of this edited collection is a sophisticated engagement with one of the core dichotomies in social theory, namely that between the symbolic and the material. The contributions address various articulations of this tension in the context of a long-term conflict and show how an analysis of media, broadly defined, helps us to understand the intricate relationship between the two.” • Bart Cammaerts, London School of Economics

“This essay collection is a valuable contribution not only to Cyprus specifically, but to conflict studies more broadly. It innovatively combines discursive and material analyses of the Cyprus conflict, providing a forum for distinctive authorial voices while maintaining a coherent, complex, and dynamic theoretical framework.” • Lydia Papadimitriou, Liverpool John Moores University