Contribution short abstract

This reseach explores how grassroots cultural initiatives support reconciliation in post-conflict Cyprus. Focusing on the bi-communal Home for Cooperation, it examines community-led practices as alternatives to top-down diplomatic approaches and their role in fostering dialogue and social cohesion.

Contribution long abstract

After decades of conflict, Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities remain polarised, and Cyprus continues to be a divided island. Top-down diplomatic approaches have repeatedly failed, most recently in 2017 and again in 2025, making the case for community-led, alternative pathways to reconciliation increasingly urgent.

This research examines how grassroots cultural initiatives contribute to social cohesion and reconciliation in post-conflict Cyprus, focusing on bi-communal cultural organisations as informal actors reconfiguring power at the local level. It asks how these initiatives define value beyond economic metrics, prioritising local agency and everyday human contact over the optics that drive formal diplomacy. The analysis centres on the Home for Cooperation, a cultural organisation in the UN Buffer Zone in Nicosia, drawing on three months of fieldwork, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with core staff.

The findings are deliberately not celebratory. The Buffer Zone's neutrality generates a form of everyday contact diplomacy cannot manufacture. But the same fieldwork reveals who is, and is not, mobilised by this alternative knowledge system: participants are largely self-selected among those already sympathetic to reconciliation, and internal contradictions around language and memory complicate the organisation's own bottom-up claims. The research argues that grassroots cultural practice offers a genuine alternative development pathway, but one that must confront its own limits on inclusion if it is to build the resilient, decentralised networks the panel calls for.