The seascape of trauma in Cyprus has been integral to the island's history. The colonial legacies of the past, the 1974 Turkish invasion, the displacement, and the ethnic and gender divides have foregrounded contesting subjectivities of where and to which side of history one belongs. Performance art in Europe and the United States emerged as a site of contestation against the grand narratives imposed by the canon of art historical discourses and as a commentary on social-political themes. However, in Cyprus, performance art arrived later and faced barriers to being accepted as a credible mode of artistic inquiry. Traces of artistic representations in performance followed the European avant-garde and were foregrounded in the experience of aspects of political life. Artists arriving on the island with influences from abroad who rejected traditional art forms of dance and theatre were treated in dismay. Arianna Economou, one of the pioneering figures that introduced avant-garde performance art in Cyprus, unfolded in her practice theories of the performative as a political subject that challenged conventional modes of artmaking through her body and through her activism in bringing together inter-communal exchanges with Turkish Cypriots artists as well as her contribution to the performance art scene of Cyprus.
The Eastern Mediterranean has emerged as a significant geopolitical region in the 21st century, influenced by both intra-regional dynamics and the strategic interests of international powers. The Republic of Cyprus (RoC)—a small State within this region—has endeavoured to adapt to the evolving international landscape and promote its own strategic interests. This paper examines the RoC’s foreign policy in the Eastern Mediterranean, particularly its involvement in regional cooperation and the formation of quasi-alliances. The primary focus is twofold: situating the RoC’s foreign policy within the international-regional nexus (particularly US policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and US–RoC relations), and assessing its strategic objectives and priorities. The analysis revisits the formation of quasi-alliances, such as the Israel–Cyprus–Greece and Egypt–Cyprus–Greece partnerships, and regional networks of cooperation. The key questions addressed include the success of RoC policy since the early 2010s, the positives and negatives of its approach, and the preconditions for a more effective foreign policy. The paper concludes that, despite notable progress, the RoC’s foreign policy suffers from a lack of vision, strategic planning, and institutional capacities, making it vulnerable to domestic politics, populist rhetoric, and geopolitical shifts.
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting is a revolution in the operation of businesses. In recent years, more and more businesses are required or decide to publish corporate sustainability reports that highlight their performance in the environmental, social, and intergovernmental pillar. The recent Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) includes small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the context of mandatory ESG reporting. The goal of this paper is to provide a model ESG reporting framework to assist Cypriot and Greek SMEs in collecting and disclosing relevant data. A study was conducted to assess the readiness of Greek and Cypriot SMEs to engage in ESG reporting. The results revealed a relatively low level of maturity in this regard. At the same time, there is growing demand to develop a more cost-effective, user friendly, and straightforward ESG framework.
The epistemology of dance, namely, how dance is understood and the circumstances through which it is utilised and re-enforced as knowledge-making, is paramount to the development of dance and its history. I am not concerned about defining what dance is—that is separate from the main discussion of this article; rather, I address the way and the conditions in which it is captured, archived, transmitted, and re-used. A dance genealogy can be synthesised by examining one’s autoethnographic dance archive, in-cluding unarchived content. Applying dance genealogy to trace the historiographic and ethnographic lines of thought about matters pertaining to dance and performance is a crucial requirement for further study and exploration. In this article, I discuss an ex-cerpt of my autoethnographic dance-based journey and piece together the experiences I collected, as well as the practices and knowledge that shaped my dance genealogy. Using my background helps form a point of reference for further critical analysis. It offers a method of combining research on the performativity of dance, as experienced from the practitioner’s and archive user’s perspective, and the liveness of dance through re-flecting on experiential knowledge. This creates another relationship of critical analysis between the epistemology of the (dance) practitioner and their genealogy so as to open up a post-structural methodological approach to inscribing cultural and social history.
