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Paper short abstract

This paper traces how crossings opened in 2003 across Cyprus’s Green Line are lived in Northern Cyprus, as unresolved violence settles into documents, rumours, everyday crossing practices, sustaining im/mobility as an anticipated condition through which aspirations for ‘better days’ are navigated.

Paper long abstract

This paper traces how the opening of the crossings in 2003 was encountered, anticipated, and folded into everyday life in Northern Cyprus. A ceasefire line in effect since 1974, the Green Line’s opening was experienced as a previously unimagined possibility and widely framed as a ‘door’ oriented toward ‘better days’ and toward ‘Europe’ in Northern Cyprus. Over time, crossing has come to organise the near-daily rhythms of life for many, even as access remains uneven and uncertain. Crossing is mediated through regimes of identification, whereby birth certificates, marriage ties, and bureaucratic classifications determine who is recognised as “from Cyprus” and permitted to cross.

Read through Avery Gordon’s account of haunting, the crossing emerges as a durational scene in which unresolved political violence presses into the present through documents, rumours, dreams, and routine encounters. The paper follows these fragments as sites through which mobility and immobility are constituted as interdependent conditions shaping everyday life. Im/mobility thus emerges not as an outcome but as a lived and anticipated condition that organises everyday orientations toward movement.

Aspirations for ‘better days’ are oriented toward 'Europe' as a proximate articulation of broader global imaginaries of the ‘good life’, while being continually reshaped through the lived conditions of division. In this sense, unresolved political violence and late-capitalist imaginaries of ‘better days’ converge and mutually shape one another through the ordinary, ongoing practices of im/mobility.