Legal identity in “half a country”: Disparate citizenship constellations in Northern Cyprus

This paper studies the dynamics around legal identity documents within the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), a self-declared state sponsored by Turkey that remained unrecognised by other states. To grapple with the complexities and ambiguities around this de facto state, scholars have drawn on the conceptual language of “asymmetric citizenship” (Loizides 2011), aporias (Bryant & Hatay 2020), the state of exception (Constantinou 2007) and affect (Navaro-Yashin 2012). This paper explores the lived realities of the TRNC’s convoluted legal landscape by looking at legal identity documents and how they shape the life trajectories of the people who hold them. A purely legal or technical understanding of legal identity and concurrent rights is inadequate. We must subject these phenomena to a politically informed analysis of the everyday practices through which legal norms and spaces are continuously shaped and reshaped. Joining hands with other critical readers of Hannah Arendt, my paper underlines that there is more at stake than making sure that a person is recognized as a citizen by a state. Rather, we need to understand how a person’s legal identity yields an array of rights and duties vis-a-vis one or more states; and how this requires that person to navigate convoluted, and sometimes overlapping, legal-political landscapes to claim these rights. The plight of Turkish Cypriots – the foremost citizens of the TRNC in the public imaginary – is well documented (e.g. Navaro-Yashin 2012), but they represent only a fraction of citizenship constellations that proliferate in Northern Cyprus. The paper presents life history narratives anchored in the constraints and affordances of diverse legal identities, including Turkish Cypriots of Cypriot descent, a Turkish Cypriots of partly Turkish descent, Turkmen labour migrants, and asylum seekers or Kurdish and other backgrounds. Depending on how one’s legal identity constellation plays out, Northern Cyprus presents itself as a hyper-connected modern European crossroads, a secluded liberal annex to Turkey, a disconnected but safe haven, or an open-air prison.