Costas M Constantinou
Biographic Data
| ID | 101508 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Costas M Constantinou |
| GIVEN NAMES | Costas M |
| FAMILY NAME | Constantinou |
| SIGNATURE | CONSTANTINOU C M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cyprus |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0049-9249 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 202 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Slow Diplomacy
This Forum Discussion explores the notion of slow diplomacy via an engagement with the tradition of diplomatic epistolography. Specifically, it examines an overlooked aspect of diplomatic practice operating beyond the instrumental, fast-paced, and solution-based exchanges of diplomatic communication. Our focus on epistolography shifts from letters as static artifacts and correspondences to letters as “silent envoys” and iterative performances tha…
Reimagining self-determination
Self-determination language and practice are increasingly perplexing in the 21st century. Historically linked to decolonization processes and post-imperial transformations of the international system, self-determination has espoused both violent and non-violent resistance, and supported both existing and emergent sovereignty. With the Janus-faced relationship between self-determination and colonialism continuing to this day, the contemporary mome…
On making peace with nature
This article interrogates United Nations (UN) calls that ‘making peace with nature’ should become the crucial mission of the 21st century. It ponders the kind of diplomacy envisioned for such a reconciliation ecology to be credible. Drawing on one of the most promising and less known programmes of the UN system – namely, Harmony with Nature (HwN), which pioneers Earth-based jurisprudence and rights of nature – it conceptualises this diplomatic sh…
Lateral colonialism
This article contributes to an understanding of how the world outside the Global North is complicit in the visibility politics that render spaces of harm relevant or irrelevant to the reproduction of racism. Extending insights from decolonial theorising, we examine the colonial matrix that produces ongoing legacies of violence and racism through the case of Cyprus. As a peripheral location, Cyprus has been invisible to this story yet had a role i…
Humanitarian diplomacy as moral history
This article interrogates the practice of humanitarian diplomacy by focusing on the history of the Red Cross Movement. It approaches humanitarian diplomacy beyond its technical understanding as a neutral tool for advocating and negotiating on behalf of vulnerable people. It suggests that by flagging high moral purpose, diplomacy can employ the humanitarian logic to also pursue parallel objectives and ethically ambiguous goals. Specifically, the a…
On the right to diplomacy
This article analyses the disregarded notion of the ius legationis (right of legation), revisiting historical debates in diplomatic theory and law over who possesses or ought to have this right. By examining how the ius legationis manifested into a volitional or subjectional or natural right, we argue that this renders it not merely a legal issue, but a highly political and ethical question that is of direct relevance to contemporary internationa…
Why Greeks and Turks Fight
The bicentennial of the Greek Revolution against Ottoman rule is an opportune time to ask why conflict between Greeks and Turks has continued for over two hundred years. Greek and Turkish national narratives reveal deeper reasons for the persistence of mutual belligerence, including common emphasis on national emancipation through violence, perceptions of iniquitous treatment in previous political settlements, and the influence of “banal imperial…
Around the Broken Chair
The Broken Chair, a colossal sculpture positioned in the Place de Nations outside the main entrance to the Palais de Nations — the UN Office at Geneva — provides a site and a micro-geography of diplomacy. This essay examines this transgressive gift to the UN, challenging customary norms of gift-giving, and its energetic use by liminal diplomatic subjects pursuing diverse causes. It explores the social life and agential competences of this diploma…
Thinking with Diplomacy
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
Imagining Ro
This article engages the challenge of island history as caught in between national historiography and local life stories. It focuses on Ro, a Greek islet bordering Turkey that has been imagined and idealized as a space of national resistance and resilience. The article unpacks the grand national narrative that has been developed with regard to the heroic life story of a solitary woman living on the island. It utilizes local counter-narratives as …
Liquid Entitlement
This article examines the role of international law in extending entitlement at sea and undermining the ocean commons. It suggests that entitlement through enclosure and territoriality has been a persistent feature at sea, historically taking different forms, with hard and softer versions of claiming authority and jurisdiction. In our endeavour to conceptualise this problematic, we employ the notion of liquid entitlement to refer to the agility a…
Ambivalent greenings, collateral conservation
Video dispatch from the borderscape
This article should be read together with watching the video Lines (2019). Video and text explore the complex Cypriot borderscape that crisscrosses over four rival zones of control and jurisdiction. The article reflects on videographic methods and the challenges faced in filming the borderscape. In addition, video and text highlight the relevance of the emerging field of diplomatic geography, approaching diplomacy not merely as something that hap…
On biodiplomacy
This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizi…
Visual Diplomacy
In engaging the visual aspects of public diplomacy, this article has three objectives. First, it introduces the notion of visual diplomacy — the ways and means by which images are used by plural diplomatic actors to transmit ideas to audiences, producing and circulating meanings that serve particular purposes, with the aim of influencing, shaping and transforming relations between actors and across publics. Second, it examines how the spectacle o…
The Sage Handbook of Diplomacy
Diplomatic Challenges in a Crisis World
The objective of this forum is to provide a framework for intellectual exchange and debate about the role of diplomacy in negotiating global crises and the impact of such crises on the evolution of diplomatic leadership, identity and method. Drawing on theories of leadership, decision-making, power and crisis management, the five contributions to this forum invite readers to reflect upon the analytical implications of theorizing crisis diplomacy
In Pursuit of Crisis Diplomacy
Engaging the ‘ungoverned’
This article explores biopolitical practices that extend beyond national borders and take the whole of humanity as their province. It looks at how attempts to secure and optimize conditions of living in Africa are not merely governmental in scope but also diplomatic in their conceptualization and conduct. It specifically examines the merging of diplomacy, defence and development (or the 3Ds), which purports to optimize life and shape ways of bein…
Between Statecraft and Humanism
Journal Article Between Statecraft and Humanism: Diplomacy and Its Forms of Knowledge Get access Costas M. Constantinou Costas M. Constantinou Department of Social and Political Sciences University of Cyprus Nicosia Cyprus Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Review, Volume 15, Issue 2, June 2013, Pages 141–162, https://doi.org/10.1111/misr.12037 Published: 17 June 2013
New Middle East, new insecurities and the limits of liberation geography
Conflicts and Uses of Cultural Heritage in Cyprus
This paper examines the conflicts and politics of heritage within communities and across the ethnic divide in Cyprus. By looking at three case studies of religious, antiquarian and modern heritage, it underscores the selective appropriations and restorations of heritage as well as problems of heritage identification and protection. Specifically it is concerned with the status of churches and building of mosques in the northern part of the island,…
Conflicts of Heritage in the Balkans and the Near East
Multidirectional Diplomacy and the Privatization of Settlement
What constitutes a “solution” to a political problem? How far is the solution complicated by rival perceptions on what exactly is the problem? How does the insolubility of a protracted conflict acq
Introduction
Can diplomacy be saved? Can diplomacy save us?
Aporias of identity
This article examines the predicaments and paradoxes of identity politics in Cyprus. It looks at the historical alliance of colonial practices and nationalist rationales that brought about a static bicommunal system, establishing the basis for inter-ethnic conflict, or what became known as the `Cyprus problem'. The advent of modern governmentality, dividing and classifying the Cypriot population, helped, in addition, to solidify fluid and ambiguo…
Thinking with Diplomacy
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
On Homo-Diplomacy
This article explores alternative cultures of diplomacy that have been neglected in diplomatic studies and global politics. It is concerned firstly with the human dimension of diplomacy, that is to say, the interpersonal dealings of the homo sapiens, or the experimental and experiential diplomacy of everyday life. It is concerned secondly with the spiritual and transformative potential of diplomacy, a form of diplomacy that engages in heterology …
Before the Summit
On the Cypriot States of Exception
This article explores the politics of exceptionality in Cyprus. It focuses on the postcolonial constriction of Cypriot statehood—the framing of the sovereign itself as an exception—and how the emerging discourse of exceptionality unfolded a spiral of states of exception on the ground. Looking in and across a variety of Cypriot sites and regimes (north, south, sovereign base areas and buffer zone) the article examines what claims of exceptionality…
The Cypriot State(s) in situ
Visual Diplomacy
In engaging the visual aspects of public diplomacy, this article has three objectives. First, it introduces the notion of visual diplomacy — the ways and means by which images are used by plural diplomatic actors to transmit ideas to audiences, producing and circulating meanings that serve particular purposes, with the aim of influencing, shaping and transforming relations between actors and across publics. Second, it examines how the spectacle o…
Cyprus, ethnic conflict and conflicted heritage
This article examines the dominant heritage discourse in Cyprus concerning preservation and destruction, and its implications for ethno-cultural identity construction and promotion. By exploring two heritage sites (one north and one south of the Buffer Zone) it suggests that heritage practice is more complex than commonly presented. Specifically, it shows how ethnic conflict has not only been responsible for heritage destruction but also for the …
Video dispatch from the borderscape
This article should be read together with watching the video Lines (2019). Video and text explore the complex Cypriot borderscape that crisscrosses over four rival zones of control and jurisdiction. The article reflects on videographic methods and the challenges faced in filming the borderscape. In addition, video and text highlight the relevance of the emerging field of diplomatic geography, approaching diplomacy not merely as something that hap…
Poetics of Security
On October 23, 1983, at around 6:20 a.m., there was a suicide attack against the U.S. Marine battalion in Beirut. A lorry-van loaded with an estimated four thousand pounds of explosives was driven and exploded inside the military headquarters, killing 260 American marines and resulting in the withdrawal of the multinational force from Lebanon. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack. Later, it was revealed that a security camera had c…
Engaging the ‘ungoverned’
This article explores biopolitical practices that extend beyond national borders and take the whole of humanity as their province. It looks at how attempts to secure and optimize conditions of living in Africa are not merely governmental in scope but also diplomatic in their conceptualization and conduct. It specifically examines the merging of diplomacy, defence and development (or the 3Ds), which purports to optimize life and shape ways of bein…
The Long Mile of Empire
This article examines the continuities and discontinuities of imperial rule in Cyprus. It specifically investigates how the UK military base regime in the island has been negotiated in its local and regional contexts, including the recent accession of Cyprus into the European Union (EU) from whose territory the bases have been excluded. The study outlines the legal and political discourses and aesthetic practices surrounding the bases, and attemp…
Reimagining self-determination
Self-determination language and practice are increasingly perplexing in the 21st century. Historically linked to decolonization processes and post-imperial transformations of the international system, self-determination has espoused both violent and non-violent resistance, and supported both existing and emergent sovereignty. With the Janus-faced relationship between self-determination and colonialism continuing to this day, the contemporary mome…
Imagining Ro
This article engages the challenge of island history as caught in between national historiography and local life stories. It focuses on Ro, a Greek islet bordering Turkey that has been imagined and idealized as a space of national resistance and resilience. The article unpacks the grand national narrative that has been developed with regard to the heroic life story of a solitary woman living on the island. It utilizes local counter-narratives as …
On biodiplomacy
This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizi…
Multidirectional Diplomacy and the Privatization of Settlement
What constitutes a “solution” to a political problem? How far is the solution complicated by rival perceptions on what exactly is the problem? How does the insolubility of a protracted conflict acq
Diplomacy, grotesque realism, and Ottoman historiography
(2000). Diplomacy, grotesque realism, and Ottoman historiography. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 213-226
Antidiplomacy
Journal Article Antidiplomacy: spies, terror, speed and war Get access Antidiplomacy: spies, terror, speed and war. By James Der Derian. Oxford: Blackwell. 1992. 215pp. Index. £35.00; ISBN 1 55786 151 x. Pb.: £12.95; ISBN 1 55786 344 x. Costas M. Constantinou Costas M. Constantinou 1University of Lancaster Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 69, Issue 3, July 1993, Pages 554–555, …
Liquid Entitlement
This article examines the role of international law in extending entitlement at sea and undermining the ocean commons. It suggests that entitlement through enclosure and territoriality has been a persistent feature at sea, historically taking different forms, with hard and softer versions of claiming authority and jurisdiction. In our endeavour to conceptualise this problematic, we employ the notion of liquid entitlement to refer to the agility a…
The Beautiful Nation
An aesthetics of Hellenism affirming an exclusivity and localization of the beautiful oscillates along a political axis from domination to liberation. This article seeks to unsettle such accounts of “the beautiful nation” so as to enable other mediations of the real and the ideal, and thus a more open and heterodox vision of nation and homeland
The Cypriot State(s) in situ
Late Modern Diplomacies
On the right to diplomacy
This article analyses the disregarded notion of the ius legationis (right of legation), revisiting historical debates in diplomatic theory and law over who possesses or ought to have this right. By examining how the ius legationis manifested into a volitional or subjectional or natural right, we argue that this renders it not merely a legal issue, but a highly political and ethical question that is of direct relevance to contemporary internationa…
Around the Broken Chair
The Broken Chair, a colossal sculpture positioned in the Place de Nations outside the main entrance to the Palais de Nations — the UN Office at Geneva — provides a site and a micro-geography of diplomacy. This essay examines this transgressive gift to the UN, challenging customary norms of gift-giving, and its energetic use by liminal diplomatic subjects pursuing diverse causes. It explores the social life and agential competences of this diploma…
Hippopolis/Cynopolis
Late Modern Diplomacies
The diplomatic record, 1991–1992
Journal Article The diplomatic record, 1991–1992 Get access The diplomatic record, 1991–1992. Edited by Hans Binnendijkand Mary Locke. Boulder, CO, Oxford: Westview. 1993. 319pp. Index. Pb.: £19.95. ISBN 0 8133 1688 x. Costas M. Constantinou Costas M. Constantinou 1University of Lancaster Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 69, Issue 4, October 1993, Pages 755–756, https://doi.org…
Antidiplomacy
Journal Article Antidiplomacy: spies, terror, speed and war Get access Antidiplomacy: spies, terror, speed and war. By James Der Derian. Oxford: Blackwell. 1992. 215pp. Index. £35.00; ISBN 1 55786 151 x. Pb.: £12.95; ISBN 1 55786 344 x. Costas M. Constantinou Costas M. Constantinou 1University of Lancaster Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 69, Issue 3, July 1993, Pages 554–555, …
Diplomatic Representations…or Who Framed the Ambassadors
Nato's Caps
Talking to the enemy
Journal Article Talking to the enemy: how states without ‘diplomatic relations’ communicate Get access Talking to the enemy: how states without ‘diplomatic relations’ communicate. By G. R. Berridge. London: Macmillan. 1994. 178pp. Index. £35.00. ISBN 0 333 55655 0. Costas M. Constantinou Costas M. Constantinou 1University of Hull Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 71, Issue 1, Ja…
Simulating sovereignty
Journal Article Simulating sovereignty: intervention, the state and symbolic exchange Get access Simulating sovereignty: intervention, the state and symbolic exchange. By Cynthia Weber. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994. 147pp. Index. £30.00; ISBN 0 521 45523 5. Pb.: £12.95; ISBN 0 521 45559 6. Costas M. Constantinou Costas M. Constantinou 1University of Hull Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Inter…
Before the Summit
Poetics of Security
On October 23, 1983, at around 6:20 a.m., there was a suicide attack against the U.S. Marine battalion in Beirut. A lorry-van loaded with an estimated four thousand pounds of explosives was driven and exploded inside the military headquarters, killing 260 American marines and resulting in the withdrawal of the multinational force from Lebanon. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack. Later, it was revealed that a security camera had c…
Diplomacy, grotesque realism, and Ottoman historiography
(2000). Diplomacy, grotesque realism, and Ottoman historiography. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 213-226
The Cypriot State(s) in situ
The Cypriot State(s) in situ
Hippopolis/Cynopolis
The Long Mile of Empire
This article examines the continuities and discontinuities of imperial rule in Cyprus. It specifically investigates how the UK military base regime in the island has been negotiated in its local and regional contexts, including the recent accession of Cyprus into the European Union (EU) from whose territory the bases have been excluded. The study outlines the legal and political discourses and aesthetic practices surrounding the bases, and attemp…
On Homo-Diplomacy
This article explores alternative cultures of diplomacy that have been neglected in diplomatic studies and global politics. It is concerned firstly with the human dimension of diplomacy, that is to say, the interpersonal dealings of the homo sapiens, or the experimental and experiential diplomacy of everyday life. It is concerned secondly with the spiritual and transformative potential of diplomacy, a form of diplomacy that engages in heterology …
The Beautiful Nation
An aesthetics of Hellenism affirming an exclusivity and localization of the beautiful oscillates along a political axis from domination to liberation. This article seeks to unsettle such accounts of “the beautiful nation” so as to enable other mediations of the real and the ideal, and thus a more open and heterodox vision of nation and homeland
Aporias of identity
This article examines the predicaments and paradoxes of identity politics in Cyprus. It looks at the historical alliance of colonial practices and nationalist rationales that brought about a static bicommunal system, establishing the basis for inter-ethnic conflict, or what became known as the `Cyprus problem'. The advent of modern governmentality, dividing and classifying the Cypriot population, helped, in addition, to solidify fluid and ambiguo…
International Relations and the challenges of global communication
We live in an interconnected, hyper-mediated world. A plethora of communications surrounds our everyday lives and polities, whilst new media and technologies have brought forth possibilities for, and ways of, communicating across space and time. Long-distance communication and travelling, the accelerated flow of information, ideas, images and sounds across national and other frontiers, the construction of multinational urban centres and global me…
Communications/excommunications
This interview was conducted over the Internet between February and April 2006. Armand Mattelart is Emeritus Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris VIII. From 1962 to 1973 he was Professor of Sociology of Population and Communication at the Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, and United Nations expert in social development. During the Popular Unity period (1970–73), he worked with the Government of Pres…
On the Cypriot States of Exception
This article explores the politics of exceptionality in Cyprus. It focuses on the postcolonial constriction of Cypriot statehood—the framing of the sovereign itself as an exception—and how the emerging discourse of exceptionality unfolded a spiral of states of exception on the ground. Looking in and across a variety of Cypriot sites and regimes (north, south, sovereign base areas and buffer zone) the article examines what claims of exceptionality…
Introduction
Can diplomacy be saved? Can diplomacy save us?
Sustainable Diplomacies
Cyprus, ethnic conflict and conflicted heritage
This article examines the dominant heritage discourse in Cyprus concerning preservation and destruction, and its implications for ethno-cultural identity construction and promotion. By exploring two heritage sites (one north and one south of the Buffer Zone) it suggests that heritage practice is more complex than commonly presented. Specifically, it shows how ethnic conflict has not only been responsible for heritage destruction but also for the …
Conflicts and Uses of Cultural Heritage in Cyprus
This paper examines the conflicts and politics of heritage within communities and across the ethnic divide in Cyprus. By looking at three case studies of religious, antiquarian and modern heritage, it underscores the selective appropriations and restorations of heritage as well as problems of heritage identification and protection. Specifically it is concerned with the status of churches and building of mosques in the northern part of the island,…
Conflicts of Heritage in the Balkans and the Near East
Political science (42 works) · Law (39 works) · Politics (32 works) · Sociology (31 works) · Law (30 works) · Diplomacy (18 works) · Cyprus History, Politics, Society (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Political economy (12 works) · Art (11 works)