Iosif Kovras
Biographic Data
| ID | 146490 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Iosif Kovras |
| GIVEN NAMES | Iosif |
| FAMILY NAME | Kovras |
| SIGNATURE | KOVRAS I |
| AFFILIATIONS | City, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2787-2389 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 178 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Origins of Transnational Repression: Colonial Legacies and Authoritarian Circulations in Libya’s Disappearance Regime
Enforced disappearance is often treated as a domestic aberration or a problem of transitional justice. This article reconceptualizes disappearance as a transnational infrastructure of authoritarian governance, through which states assert sovereign power, delineate ideological boundaries, and render political opposition invisible across borders. Drawing on international political sociology, it develops an account of disappearance as an infrastruct…
Justice on Hold: Explaining the Reluctance of Victims to Seek Accountability
∞ This article addresses a critical puzzle in transitional justice – why victims’ groups refrain from using their legal right to seek truth and accountability, despite possessing the evidence to do so. We examine the work of the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP), a bicommunal initiative operating in Cyprus that facilitates truth seeking through exhumations and identifications under a ‘truth for amnesty’ framework. The CMP has addressed pressing …
Digging up crimes: Forensic perspectives on perpetrator-led exhumations
Why do violent actors engage in strategic exhumations and relocate victims’ remains after a conflict, even when those remains no longer pose any security threat? We argue that analyzing the strategic management of victims’ remains by perpetrators can reveal a lot about the logic motivating actors to deploy clandestine repertoires of violence. We drew on a new global repository of countries with strategic exhumations supporting a comparative analy…
Explaining strategic disinterment: Forensics and the reconstruction of the missing in Cyprus
The paper investigates the phenomenon of ‘strategic disinterment’ in Cyprus, namely the purposeful and selective destruction of primary graves and removal of remains of missing persons to unknown secondary burial sites. Our examination of why violent actors invest valuable resources to exhume victims from the original burial location, even when they no longer pose a security threat, has significant theoretical and methodological implications. Fir…
Role of honor, dignity, and face values in transitional justice in postconflict cyprus
Transitional justice can help secure some level of justice for victims of human rights violations and reinforce the possibilities for peace, democracy, and reconciliation in societies that have experienced human rights abuses. Despite growing literature on the drives of transitional justice, little emphasis has been paid to the role of culture on shaping transitional justice preferences. The primary objective of the paper was to test the role of …
Technologies of justice: Forensics and the Evolution of Transitional Justice
Despite growing scholarly attention to normative and institutional influences promoting international accountability, limited attention has been paid to the transformative role of forensic technologies in reshaping how societies deal with their violent past. The paper contributes to transitional justice debates by revealing the revolutionary, yet undertheorized, role of forensic technologies of justice in advancing victims’ struggle for truth, ac…
The EU’s truth by omission: Learning and accountability after the Eurozone crisis
While the literature generally frames crises as catalysts for organisational learning, most theories focus on ‘success’ stories of learning – ex post facto explanations of why certain ideas gained traction after a specific crisis. Less emphasis has been placed on lessons that were likely to be drawn, but were not. In probing this point, we explore the European Union’s selective learning after the recent Eurozone crisis. Reforms were mostly top-do…
Crisis and Punishment? Explaining Politicians' Appetite for Retribution in Post-Crisis Europe
This article investigates the politics of holding bank executives accountable for banking crises. The post-2008 financial crisis was characterized by a significant variation in the endorsement of retributive justice. While some countries established special prosecutorial bodies and facilitated prosecutions, others relied on the existing prosecutorial mechanisms to seek out wrongdoing. The comparative experience of Iceland and Cyprus shows that th…
The perils of accountability after crisis: Ambiguity, policy legacies, and value trade-offs
This article interrogates a tension at the heart of the principle of accountability: accountability as a principle of non-impunity of public officials versus accountability as a form of bureaucratic organisation and control. Although these dimensions are distinguishable in the abstract, their ambiguity has led to an expectations gap among both citizens and elites. The historical legacies of previous policies can exacerbate this expectations gap, …
Explaining disappearances as a tool of political terror
Despite the widespread use of disappearances as a central tool of terror in recent decades, little is known about the emergence of the phenomenon or its underlying rationale. We argue that growing international accountability norms, coupled with the improved quality of reporting human rights abuses, paradoxically reshaped the repressive strategies of certain regimes and pushed them to deploy more clandestine and extrajudicial forms of repression,…
Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game
This article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to learn from past policy failures and address accountability, more specifically, truth commissions. We raise two overlapping puzzles. The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic truth commission: while Iceland established a truth commission at an early stage of the cris…
Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice
Transitional justice has emerged to address victims' needs as a means of restoring relations broken by violence. Yet we know little about victims' attitudes towards different transitional justice mechanisms. Why do some victims prioritize retributive justice while others favor other forms of dealing with the violent past? What determines victims' attitudes towards transitional justice policies? To address these questions, we offer a new theoretic…
Grassroots Activism and the Evolution of Transitional Justice: The Families of the Disappeared
The families of the disappeared have long struggled to uncover the truth about their missing relatives. In so doing, their mobilization has shaped central transitional justice norms and institutions, as this ground-breaking work demonstrates. Kovras combines a new global database with the systematic analysis of four challenging case studies - Lebanon, Cyprus, South Africa and Chile - each representative of a different approach to transitional jus…
Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity by Adam Rosenblatt
Death as the border: Managing missing migrants and unidentified bodies at the EU's Mediterranean frontier
The paper explores how the management of migrant bodies by national and EU authorities reflects particular understandings of contemporary borders and how the failure to address such bodies has implications far from the frontier. The study of the management both of the dead and of the data that can serve to identify missing migrants, can benefit our understanding of the contemporary border, and has to date received only limited scholarly attention…
The Greek Debt Crisis and Southern Europe: Majoritarian Pitfalls
Although widely debated in broader socioeconomic terms, the Eurozone crisis has not received yet adequate scholarly attention with regard to the impact of alternative political systems. This article revisits the debate on majoritarian and consensus democracies drawing on recent evidence from the Eurozone debacle. Greece is particularly interesting both with regard to its potential "global spillover effects" and choice of a majoritarian political …
Explaining Prolonged Silences in Transitional Justice: The Disappeared in Cyprus and Spain
The article examines why some postconflict societies defer the recovery of those who forcibly disappeared as a result of political violence, even after a fully fledged democratic regime is consolidated. The prolonged silences in Cyprus and Spain contradict the experience of other countries such as Bosnia, Guatemala, and South Africa, where truth recovery for disappeared or missing persons was a central element of the transition to peace and democ…
Protracted Stalemates and Conflict Intervention: Policy (Un) Learning and the Cyprus–EU Debacle
The article examines why a comprehensive settlement to resolve the Cyprus problem has yet to be reached despite the existence of a positive incentive structure and the proactive involvement of regional and international organizations, including the European Union and the United Nations. To address this question, evidence from critical turning points in foreign policy decision-making in Turkey, Greece and the two communities in Cyprus is drawn on.…
De-linkage processes and grassroots movements in transitional justice
Transitional justice literature has highlighted a negative relationship between enforced disappearances and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Little attention has been paid to how human rights issues can become stepping-stones to reconciliation. The article explains the transformation of the Cypriot Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) from an inoperative body into a successful humanitarian forum, paving the way for the pro-rapprochement bi…
Cultures of Rioting and Anti-Systemic Politics in Southern Europe
The article investigates why, despite similar background conditions, Greece has been the site of frequent, highly visible, fringe, anti-system politics and street riots, while similar phenomena are rare in Spain. Although the article's focal point is the eruption of the December 2008 riots in Athens, it sheds light on the two countries' diverse social reactions to the sovereign debt crisis. Deploying the tool of media framing, it argues that hist…
Non-apologies and prolonged silences in post-conflict settings: The case of post-colonial Cyprus
Despite the growing use of apologies in post-conflict settings, cases of non-apology remain unaddressed and continue to puzzle scholars. This article focuses on the absence of apology by non-state and anti-state actors by examining the case of the Cypriot armed group EOKA, which has refused to offer an apology to the civilian victims of its 'anti-colonial' struggle (1955-1959). Using field data and parliamentary debates, and drawing on comparison…
Delaying truth recovery for missing persons: Delaying Truth recovery for missing persons
The fate of missing persons is a central issue in post-conflict societies facing truth recovery and human rights dilemmas. Despite widespread public sympathy towards relatives, societies emerging from conflict often defer the recovery of missing for decades. More paradoxically, in post-1974 Cyprus, the official authorities delayed unilateral exhumations of victims buried within cemeteries in their own jurisdiction. Analysis of official post-1974 …
The parliamentary election in Greece, October 2009
Unearthing the Truth: The Politics of Exhumations in Cyprus and Spain
Contrary to the experience of other countries with memories of clandestine violence and “missing persons”, where the mobilisation of the (civil) society towards “truth recovery” was immediate and pivotal, the societies of Cyprus and Spain remained silent for a remarkably long period of time. This article aspires to explain the reasons why both Cypriot communities and the Spanish society did not manage, until recently, to comprehensively address—n…
Death as the border: Managing missing migrants and unidentified bodies at the EU's Mediterranean frontier
The paper explores how the management of migrant bodies by national and EU authorities reflects particular understandings of contemporary borders and how the failure to address such bodies has implications far from the frontier. The study of the management both of the dead and of the data that can serve to identify missing migrants, can benefit our understanding of the contemporary border, and has to date received only limited scholarly attention…
Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice
Transitional justice has emerged to address victims' needs as a means of restoring relations broken by violence. Yet we know little about victims' attitudes towards different transitional justice mechanisms. Why do some victims prioritize retributive justice while others favor other forms of dealing with the violent past? What determines victims' attitudes towards transitional justice policies? To address these questions, we offer a new theoretic…
Cultures of Rioting and Anti-Systemic Politics in Southern Europe
The article investigates why, despite similar background conditions, Greece has been the site of frequent, highly visible, fringe, anti-system politics and street riots, while similar phenomena are rare in Spain. Although the article's focal point is the eruption of the December 2008 riots in Athens, it sheds light on the two countries' diverse social reactions to the sovereign debt crisis. Deploying the tool of media framing, it argues that hist…
Delaying truth recovery for missing persons: Delaying Truth recovery for missing persons
The fate of missing persons is a central issue in post-conflict societies facing truth recovery and human rights dilemmas. Despite widespread public sympathy towards relatives, societies emerging from conflict often defer the recovery of missing for decades. More paradoxically, in post-1974 Cyprus, the official authorities delayed unilateral exhumations of victims buried within cemeteries in their own jurisdiction. Analysis of official post-1974 …
Explaining Prolonged Silences in Transitional Justice: The Disappeared in Cyprus and Spain
The article examines why some postconflict societies defer the recovery of those who forcibly disappeared as a result of political violence, even after a fully fledged democratic regime is consolidated. The prolonged silences in Cyprus and Spain contradict the experience of other countries such as Bosnia, Guatemala, and South Africa, where truth recovery for disappeared or missing persons was a central element of the transition to peace and democ…
Explaining disappearances as a tool of political terror
Despite the widespread use of disappearances as a central tool of terror in recent decades, little is known about the emergence of the phenomenon or its underlying rationale. We argue that growing international accountability norms, coupled with the improved quality of reporting human rights abuses, paradoxically reshaped the repressive strategies of certain regimes and pushed them to deploy more clandestine and extrajudicial forms of repression,…
The Greek Debt Crisis and Southern Europe: Majoritarian Pitfalls
Although widely debated in broader socioeconomic terms, the Eurozone crisis has not received yet adequate scholarly attention with regard to the impact of alternative political systems. This article revisits the debate on majoritarian and consensus democracies drawing on recent evidence from the Eurozone debacle. Greece is particularly interesting both with regard to its potential "global spillover effects" and choice of a majoritarian political …
De-linkage processes and grassroots movements in transitional justice
Transitional justice literature has highlighted a negative relationship between enforced disappearances and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Little attention has been paid to how human rights issues can become stepping-stones to reconciliation. The article explains the transformation of the Cypriot Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) from an inoperative body into a successful humanitarian forum, paving the way for the pro-rapprochement bi…
Unearthing the Truth: The Politics of Exhumations in Cyprus and Spain
Contrary to the experience of other countries with memories of clandestine violence and “missing persons”, where the mobilisation of the (civil) society towards “truth recovery” was immediate and pivotal, the societies of Cyprus and Spain remained silent for a remarkably long period of time. This article aspires to explain the reasons why both Cypriot communities and the Spanish society did not manage, until recently, to comprehensively address—n…
Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game
This article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to learn from past policy failures and address accountability, more specifically, truth commissions. We raise two overlapping puzzles. The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic truth commission: while Iceland established a truth commission at an early stage of the cris…
Non-apologies and prolonged silences in post-conflict settings: The case of post-colonial Cyprus
Despite the growing use of apologies in post-conflict settings, cases of non-apology remain unaddressed and continue to puzzle scholars. This article focuses on the absence of apology by non-state and anti-state actors by examining the case of the Cypriot armed group EOKA, which has refused to offer an apology to the civilian victims of its 'anti-colonial' struggle (1955-1959). Using field data and parliamentary debates, and drawing on comparison…
Technologies of justice: Forensics and the Evolution of Transitional Justice
Despite growing scholarly attention to normative and institutional influences promoting international accountability, limited attention has been paid to the transformative role of forensic technologies in reshaping how societies deal with their violent past. The paper contributes to transitional justice debates by revealing the revolutionary, yet undertheorized, role of forensic technologies of justice in advancing victims’ struggle for truth, ac…
The perils of accountability after crisis: Ambiguity, policy legacies, and value trade-offs
This article interrogates a tension at the heart of the principle of accountability: accountability as a principle of non-impunity of public officials versus accountability as a form of bureaucratic organisation and control. Although these dimensions are distinguishable in the abstract, their ambiguity has led to an expectations gap among both citizens and elites. The historical legacies of previous policies can exacerbate this expectations gap, …
The parliamentary election in Greece, October 2009
Unearthing the Truth: The Politics of Exhumations in Cyprus and Spain
Contrary to the experience of other countries with memories of clandestine violence and “missing persons”, where the mobilisation of the (civil) society towards “truth recovery” was immediate and pivotal, the societies of Cyprus and Spain remained silent for a remarkably long period of time. This article aspires to explain the reasons why both Cypriot communities and the Spanish society did not manage, until recently, to comprehensively address—n…
The parliamentary election in Greece, October 2009
Delaying truth recovery for missing persons: Delaying Truth recovery for missing persons
The fate of missing persons is a central issue in post-conflict societies facing truth recovery and human rights dilemmas. Despite widespread public sympathy towards relatives, societies emerging from conflict often defer the recovery of missing for decades. More paradoxically, in post-1974 Cyprus, the official authorities delayed unilateral exhumations of victims buried within cemeteries in their own jurisdiction. Analysis of official post-1974 …
Protracted Stalemates and Conflict Intervention: Policy (Un) Learning and the Cyprus–EU Debacle
The article examines why a comprehensive settlement to resolve the Cyprus problem has yet to be reached despite the existence of a positive incentive structure and the proactive involvement of regional and international organizations, including the European Union and the United Nations. To address this question, evidence from critical turning points in foreign policy decision-making in Turkey, Greece and the two communities in Cyprus is drawn on.…
De-linkage processes and grassroots movements in transitional justice
Transitional justice literature has highlighted a negative relationship between enforced disappearances and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Little attention has been paid to how human rights issues can become stepping-stones to reconciliation. The article explains the transformation of the Cypriot Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) from an inoperative body into a successful humanitarian forum, paving the way for the pro-rapprochement bi…
Cultures of Rioting and Anti-Systemic Politics in Southern Europe
The article investigates why, despite similar background conditions, Greece has been the site of frequent, highly visible, fringe, anti-system politics and street riots, while similar phenomena are rare in Spain. Although the article's focal point is the eruption of the December 2008 riots in Athens, it sheds light on the two countries' diverse social reactions to the sovereign debt crisis. Deploying the tool of media framing, it argues that hist…
Non-apologies and prolonged silences in post-conflict settings: The case of post-colonial Cyprus
Despite the growing use of apologies in post-conflict settings, cases of non-apology remain unaddressed and continue to puzzle scholars. This article focuses on the absence of apology by non-state and anti-state actors by examining the case of the Cypriot armed group EOKA, which has refused to offer an apology to the civilian victims of its 'anti-colonial' struggle (1955-1959). Using field data and parliamentary debates, and drawing on comparison…
Explaining Prolonged Silences in Transitional Justice: The Disappeared in Cyprus and Spain
The article examines why some postconflict societies defer the recovery of those who forcibly disappeared as a result of political violence, even after a fully fledged democratic regime is consolidated. The prolonged silences in Cyprus and Spain contradict the experience of other countries such as Bosnia, Guatemala, and South Africa, where truth recovery for disappeared or missing persons was a central element of the transition to peace and democ…
The Greek Debt Crisis and Southern Europe: Majoritarian Pitfalls
Although widely debated in broader socioeconomic terms, the Eurozone crisis has not received yet adequate scholarly attention with regard to the impact of alternative political systems. This article revisits the debate on majoritarian and consensus democracies drawing on recent evidence from the Eurozone debacle. Greece is particularly interesting both with regard to its potential "global spillover effects" and choice of a majoritarian political …
Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science after Atrocity by Adam Rosenblatt
Death as the border: Managing missing migrants and unidentified bodies at the EU's Mediterranean frontier
The paper explores how the management of migrant bodies by national and EU authorities reflects particular understandings of contemporary borders and how the failure to address such bodies has implications far from the frontier. The study of the management both of the dead and of the data that can serve to identify missing migrants, can benefit our understanding of the contemporary border, and has to date received only limited scholarly attention…
Grassroots Activism and the Evolution of Transitional Justice: The Families of the Disappeared
The families of the disappeared have long struggled to uncover the truth about their missing relatives. In so doing, their mobilization has shaped central transitional justice norms and institutions, as this ground-breaking work demonstrates. Kovras combines a new global database with the systematic analysis of four challenging case studies - Lebanon, Cyprus, South Africa and Chile - each representative of a different approach to transitional jus…
Truth Commissions after Economic Crises: Political Learning or Blame Game
This article addresses an important but understudied aspect of the recent Great Recession in Europe: the institutional strategies political elites deployed to learn from past policy failures and address accountability, more specifically, truth commissions. We raise two overlapping puzzles. The first concerns the timing of the decision to adopt an economic truth commission: while Iceland established a truth commission at an early stage of the cris…
Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Towards Transitional Justice
Transitional justice has emerged to address victims' needs as a means of restoring relations broken by violence. Yet we know little about victims' attitudes towards different transitional justice mechanisms. Why do some victims prioritize retributive justice while others favor other forms of dealing with the violent past? What determines victims' attitudes towards transitional justice policies? To address these questions, we offer a new theoretic…
Explaining disappearances as a tool of political terror
Despite the widespread use of disappearances as a central tool of terror in recent decades, little is known about the emergence of the phenomenon or its underlying rationale. We argue that growing international accountability norms, coupled with the improved quality of reporting human rights abuses, paradoxically reshaped the repressive strategies of certain regimes and pushed them to deploy more clandestine and extrajudicial forms of repression,…
The perils of accountability after crisis: Ambiguity, policy legacies, and value trade-offs
This article interrogates a tension at the heart of the principle of accountability: accountability as a principle of non-impunity of public officials versus accountability as a form of bureaucratic organisation and control. Although these dimensions are distinguishable in the abstract, their ambiguity has led to an expectations gap among both citizens and elites. The historical legacies of previous policies can exacerbate this expectations gap, …
The EU’s truth by omission: Learning and accountability after the Eurozone crisis
While the literature generally frames crises as catalysts for organisational learning, most theories focus on ‘success’ stories of learning – ex post facto explanations of why certain ideas gained traction after a specific crisis. Less emphasis has been placed on lessons that were likely to be drawn, but were not. In probing this point, we explore the European Union’s selective learning after the recent Eurozone crisis. Reforms were mostly top-do…
Crisis and Punishment? Explaining Politicians' Appetite for Retribution in Post-Crisis Europe
This article investigates the politics of holding bank executives accountable for banking crises. The post-2008 financial crisis was characterized by a significant variation in the endorsement of retributive justice. While some countries established special prosecutorial bodies and facilitated prosecutions, others relied on the existing prosecutorial mechanisms to seek out wrongdoing. The comparative experience of Iceland and Cyprus shows that th…
Role of honor, dignity, and face values in transitional justice in postconflict cyprus
Transitional justice can help secure some level of justice for victims of human rights violations and reinforce the possibilities for peace, democracy, and reconciliation in societies that have experienced human rights abuses. Despite growing literature on the drives of transitional justice, little emphasis has been paid to the role of culture on shaping transitional justice preferences. The primary objective of the paper was to test the role of …
Technologies of justice: Forensics and the Evolution of Transitional Justice
Despite growing scholarly attention to normative and institutional influences promoting international accountability, limited attention has been paid to the transformative role of forensic technologies in reshaping how societies deal with their violent past. The paper contributes to transitional justice debates by revealing the revolutionary, yet undertheorized, role of forensic technologies of justice in advancing victims’ struggle for truth, ac…
Explaining strategic disinterment: Forensics and the reconstruction of the missing in Cyprus
The paper investigates the phenomenon of ‘strategic disinterment’ in Cyprus, namely the purposeful and selective destruction of primary graves and removal of remains of missing persons to unknown secondary burial sites. Our examination of why violent actors invest valuable resources to exhume victims from the original burial location, even when they no longer pose a security threat, has significant theoretical and methodological implications. Fir…
Digging up crimes: Forensic perspectives on perpetrator-led exhumations
Why do violent actors engage in strategic exhumations and relocate victims’ remains after a conflict, even when those remains no longer pose any security threat? We argue that analyzing the strategic management of victims’ remains by perpetrators can reveal a lot about the logic motivating actors to deploy clandestine repertoires of violence. We drew on a new global repository of countries with strategic exhumations supporting a comparative analy…
The Origins of Transnational Repression: Colonial Legacies and Authoritarian Circulations in Libya’s Disappearance Regime
Enforced disappearance is often treated as a domestic aberration or a problem of transitional justice. This article reconceptualizes disappearance as a transnational infrastructure of authoritarian governance, through which states assert sovereign power, delineate ideological boundaries, and render political opposition invisible across borders. Drawing on international political sociology, it develops an account of disappearance as an infrastruct…
Justice on Hold: Explaining the Reluctance of Victims to Seek Accountability
∞ This article addresses a critical puzzle in transitional justice – why victims’ groups refrain from using their legal right to seek truth and accountability, despite possessing the evidence to do so. We examine the work of the Committee on Missing Persons (CMP), a bicommunal initiative operating in Cyprus that facilitates truth seeking through exhumations and identifications under a ‘truth for amnesty’ framework. The CMP has addressed pressing …
Political science (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Economic Justice (9 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (9 works) · Human rights (8 works) · Transitional justice (8 works)