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Paper short abstract

Amid nationalist framings of property in divided Cyprus, northern assets remain frozen while southern heirs face housing precarity. Highlighting these tensions, this paper problematizes non-transactionality and suggests that, in certain contexts, regulated exchange can foster conflict resolution.

Paper long abstract

Cyprus has remained divided for over fifty years, rendering Greek-Cypriot properties in the island’s north inaccessible to their owners and heirs. Although many retain legal title deeds, the Turkish Cypriot administration denies access and use rights. These properties are thus symbolically powerful and politically mobilised, yet materially unavailable—frozen assets within an unresolved conflict. The Greek-Cypriot administration frames these properties as national assets that must remain inalienable, withholding them from gainful exchange to sustain sovereignty claims. Occupied property is therefore never merely private but an idiom through which sovereignty is enacted at the micro level (Rakopoulos 2022).

However, ethnographic evidence reveals tensions within this nationalist fusion of property and sovereignty. While property in the north is treated as a frozen political problem, the housing crisis in the south is framed as a separate social problem despite their entanglements. Many young Greek-Cypriots facing housing precarity are heirs to land in the north that they cannot use or sell. Moralized discourses demanding that property be withheld for a future return often clash with young Greek-Cypriots’ aspirations for present stability and secure lives in the south. These dynamics complicate transitional justice in Cyprus: while non-transactionality sustains righteous claims, it constrains pragmatic responses to everyday precarity. Some interlocutors cautiously suggest that regulated transactional mechanisms may offer a way forward, even if these remain publicly contested. The Cypriot case thus problematizes non-transactional theories of property, showing how indeterminate properties, although ethically imbued and politically charged, can also reproduce impasse.