Paper short abstract:

The people of Lurucina hope that a border checkpoint connecting them to the neighbouring Greek Cypriot villages will 'revitalise' their encamped and dying village. In their struggle, they see power in really existing persons that they try to manipulate, conceptually disregarding the 'State.'

Paper long abstract:

The village of Lurucina was left in a 'frontier' location after the 1974 war that divided Cyprus; it stood far from the rest of the emergent 'northern Cyprus' and encamped by a militarised border that separated it from the surrounding Greek Cypriot territories. The social and economic relations that survived the previous decades of ethnic conflict were cut as the Turkish army declared the village a 'first-degree military zone' due to its 'sensitive location.' Furthermore, the 1974 war made obsolete the nearby highway that formerly connected Lurucina to the capital Nicosia and the port city of Larnaca, leaving only a lengthier dust road as the villagers' connection outside. After 1974, most villagers, except for some 300, left for other parts of north Cyprus and for abroad. Over the years, the remaining villagers organised alongside their 'diaspora' to pressure the Turkish Cypriot political elites and Turkish military authorities for infrastructure improvements and regulatory easements in order to help 'revitalise' the village. In my paper, I analyse the villagers' forlorn struggle for a nearby border checkpoint. Many villagers have little hope they will get a checkpoint and say their village is "destined to die." In analysing their desperate struggle, I argue that they live with an understanding of political power that conceptually disregards the 'State,' seeing it as incoherent, decentralised and epiphenomenal. Instead, they see power in various categories of persons that they pinpoint and attempt to manipulate, for example, to tolerate their 'illegal' crossings using the obsolete roads.