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Do You Remember Revolution? The Politics of Narrative, Memory and Violence
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, [email protected]
Abstact: This article presents interview material obtained on fieldwork visits to the Republic of Cyprus and Italy between 2009 and 2010. Ex-militants from four clandestine groups (EOKA, Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and Proletari Armati per il Comunismo) were asked to speak about their entry to and participation in those organisations. The article reflects on how narratives given by EOKA and anni di piombo militants about the past appear to be affected by contemporary resistances and struggles. The politicality of their narratives, and of their perceptions of history, are linked to contrasting post-conflict contexts: the anni di piombo groups experienced resounding defeat and imprisonment whereas EOKA members have enjoyed the status of freedom-fighters. The divergent effects of these outcomes upon narrative, subjectivity and references to history are centrally addressed. The article concludes by discussing the implications for interviewing practice in contentious politics research.
Introduction – The Interview in Political Violence Research
In the year 1983, eleven imprisoned autonomist activists (including the noted theorists Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno) authored a document entitled „Do You Remember Revolution?‟ The article was presented as an attempt to reclaim the history of the autonomist movement from Italy‟s „pentiti‟ phenomenon, from „memory distortion and conformity‟, and from a judicial desire to „equate subversion with terrorism‟ (Castellano et al. 1983). The attempt was both an objective and a political endeavour – objective because the activists understood history to be knowable and reclaimable from distortion, and political because history was presented as a gift for future revolutionary struggles.
The study of political violence often produces knowledge about past events but is rarely as bold as this invocation of history as both political and objective, although the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists provide the archetypal example of this in wider social science/philosophy (cf. Held 1980: 148-74; Horkheimer 2002). The study of contentious politics, within Social Movement Studies, and the field of Terrorism Studies split the concepts, attributing politicality to the groups they study 1
and associating efforts for objectivity with their own projects. „Objectivity‟ is not used here to suggest that these scholars understand their research to uncover timeless truths, but rather that the study of political violence is undertaken to produce knowledge about the causes of terrorism. „Objectivity‟, then, is used to note positivist inclinations to understand history as knowable (rather than as irredeemably constructed).
This kind of separation between politicality and objectivity in terrorism research is problematised in one way by the Critical Terrorism Studies project, which shows how the work of terrorism scholars is intensely political in its search for the „objective‟ causes of terrorism, through its reproduction of certain discourses about legitimate authority and practices (cf. Jackson et al. 2009). This will not be the direction taken in this article, though. Instead of addressing the practices of scholars I will consider the mutuality of politicality and objectivity within the testimonies of exmilitants, particularly relative to the practice of interviewing.
The Social Movement literatures on political violence and contentious politics often engage with autobiographical testimony to enrich analyses, something undertaken more infrequently within the field of Terrorism Studies – to its detriment (Horgan 2004). When interviewing is undertaken,
the testimonies of militants and ex-militants are understood relative to their relationship with past events (cf. Blee and Taylor 2002; della Porta 1992a; White 2007). As such, studies using interviews with protagonists consider methodological issues regarding the relationship between testimony and events. Robert White, for example, problematises features of interviewing like miscommunication between interviewee and researcher, the potentially fallible memories of interviewees, the reflection of personal bias in testimony and the unconscious reworking of historical facts to make them fit into a coherent sequence (White 2007). These understandings of interviewing consider the objectivity of what is said (how it relates to a knowable past), but not its politicality.
A consideration of how ex-militants narrate their experiences will be embarked upon here to „muddy the waters‟ between objectivity and politicality in memory and narrative. This is a different type of approach to conventional Social Movement and Terrorism Studies research then, as it will involve reflection upon the politicality of interviewee testimony rather than how it represents past events. The study of how people speak about the past is known as „collective memory research‟, „narrative studies‟ and „oral history‟ – when such history focuses on popular memory as a contemporary object of study (cf. Johnson and Dawson 1998). This type of research looks at the
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political roles played by popular memory, like the linking of past events with contemporary political and cultural narratives and how changing cultural contexts affect the remembering of past events.
In terms of political violence and contentious politics, examining how interviewees talk about the past can reveal much about the production of subjectivity in post-conflict situations. Research of this type has been undertaken by Luisa Passerini, who has conducted oral history studies with incarcerated women from clandestine Italian organisations such as Brigate Rosse and Prima Linea. She found important differences in the types of narratives produced in textual and oral testimony, and in the levels of memory accessible to the women in situations of incarceration and subsequent freedom (Passerini 1992), subjective location thereby affecting portrayals of the past. Like Passerini, I have conducted interviews with ex-members of Italian underground organisations. In 2010, I spoke to ex-militants from the Marxist-Leninist group Brigate Rosse (including one founding member), and from Prima Linea and PAC.1 In examining how post-conflict situation influences narratives about involvement in political violence, I will compare the testimonies of Italian interviewees with those of EOKA fighters – which I collected on fieldwork in the Republic of Cyprus in 2009.
The comparison between protagonists of these conflicts is interesting because their postconflict contexts differ so much, and through these contrasts I can examine the types of narratives and testimonies provided relative to context. While it would be a stretch to attribute victory to the EOKA organisation, EOKA members were not imprisoned after the conclusion of their clandestine struggle like the Italian militants were. Instead they enjoyed a legacy as freedom-fighters in post-colonial Greek-Cyprus - a narrative still endorsed by both political elites and right-wing political opinion in Cyprus in the years after occupation by Turkey. For example, memorial services for EOKA fighters killed during the struggle still attract high-level political delegations (cf. Theodoulou 03 April 2008), and I witnessed this at a service inside Nicosia prison for the „martyred‟ EOKA fighter Kyriakos Matsis while conducting fieldwork in Cyprus. The prison warden who accompanied me identified the Archbishop of Cyprus, the Defence Minister, and other prominent politicians of the Republic in attendance. Conversely, Italian interviewees served long prison sentences before
speaking to me and are portrayed in the media as terrorists, even to this day.
This article, then, focuses on how ex-militant testimonies mirror their post-conflict contexts. It finds that the testimonies and subjectivities of interviewees reflect profound differences between the
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One PAC interviewee contributed to the autonomi document „Do You Remember Revolution‟ quoted at the beginning of this article.
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semi-victorious and defeated case studies. The EOKA fighters described their experiences in terms of a continuous nationalist narrative, whereas the marginalised social positions of Italian ex-militants contributed to a more fractured account of self and of the decision to adopt armed struggle. „Victory‟, or perhaps the absence of defeat, has institutionalised the EOKA narrative and led to a homogenous (and exclusionary) portrayal of the past by unreflexive participants. Conversely, experiencing defeat has led the anni di piombo militants to reflect upon their actions, largely with some degree of regret and remorse, in heterogeneous and fractured ways. In both case studies, objective claims about history operated as political tools – anni di piombo militants invoked history to open up popular understandings of the 1970s and 80s, whereas the narrative of EOKA has been used to close down understandings of Cypriot nationhood.
Cyprus and Italy
As this is a short article I must assume a considerable amount of knowledge about the anticolonial struggle in Cyprus and the anni di piombo in Italy. In this section I will provide some brief contextual and historical information about both, and indicate material for further reading.
While there has been a long history of anti-colonial struggle in Cyprus, the domination of the island by foreign powers goes back considerably further. For instance Kypros Tofallis has noted the formation of clandestine organisations as far back as 1879, the year after Cyprus became administered by Britain (Tofallis 2002: 82), but British control of Cyprus was preceded by successive conquests of the island by “Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Ptolemaic Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Arabs, Franks, Venetians and Turks” (Mayes 1981: 13).
The escalation of agitation for „enosis‟ (accession to the Greek state) under British rule is connected by scholars to efforts to politically secularise the island. Under Ottoman rule, the Cypriot Church had enjoyed the position of sole political representative of the Greek community, but the British administration severed the links between the Church and tax collection, introduced a legislative assembly with secular representatives and removed certain educational privileges of the Church (Loizos 1975: 14; Markides 1977). Unrepresentative governance preceded an uprising in
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1931 where Government House was burned down and the subsequent repression implemented by the British authorities contributed to festering tensions on the island (Cameron 1971).
After participating in World War Two, when Cypriots responded to an apparent offer of national freedom by the British authorities (Holland and Markides 2006: 215), mass mobilisation reemerged in a novel climate of political openness in Cyprus where, for the first time, political parties and left-wing trade unions were allowed to flourish on the island, destabilising the traditional hierarchies of power. Archbishop Makarios and his council, perhaps threatened by this, began fostering the nationalist movement and oversaw a close relationship between the enosis campaign and the Cypriot Church (cf. Grivas 1964; Mayes 1981; Vanezis 1971; Xydis 1967: 29-30, 69-70). After the failures of attempts to obtain international sympathy for Cyprus‟ colonial predicament (Makarios undertook international tours, organised a referendum on independence and even managed to get the Cyprus question debated by the United Nations), the Archbishop authorised the start of the EOKA insurgency, which began with sabotage explosions across Cyprus on 1st April, 1955. After four years of guerrilla warfare in the Troodos mountains and urban assassination campaigns against police officers and British soldiers, EOKA succeeded in removing the British administration from the island (apart from several sovereign military bases) but union with Greece – their stated aim – was never achieved.
Regarding some key features of the contemporary Cypriot context, which informed the testimonies I collected, the post-colonial Republic of Cyprus was born in 1960 and was led by Archbishop Makarios until he was deposed in 1974‟s coup d‟état (organised by the dictatorship of „colonels‟ in Athens). An invasion of northern Cyprus by Turkish forces swiftly followed. Makarios returned to the Cypriot Presidency to lead efforts to dismantle the national partition until his death in 1977 (Mayes 1981: viii-ix), but northern Cyprus remains occupied by Turkey to this day. This was a matter of great significance to my EOKA interviewees who had risked their lives between 1955 and 1959 to be rid of occupation. Complicated dynamics also underscored their understandings of the „Cyprus problem‟; the (revered) leader of EOKA, General Grivas, was involved in this ill-fated and destructive coup d‟état which provoked the Turkish invasion. As such, interviewees resented the Turkish occupation but their testimonies were sometimes underscored by confusion about how the enosis project (to unite Cyprus with Greece) had gone so wrong. Rather than introducing reflection upon the role of EOKA in escalating ethnic tensions though, this confusion was resolved in interviews through demonization of „the Turks‟.
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Ten years after the end of the EOKA militancy, Italy was experiencing the „Hot Autumn‟ of 1969. This was a period of intense industrial unrest, where cooperation between the student
movements of 1968 and factory workers led to strikes and mass mobilisation (Della Porta 1995: 1089; Drake 1989: 1-2). Social Movement research has detailed the opportunity structures, protest cycles and pressures which led to the emergence of violent factions within leftist mobilisation in Italy (cf. Della Porta 1995; Della Porta and Tarrow 1986; Tarrow 1989; Tarrow 1991). In an article of this length I must assume considerable familiarity with the anni di piombo, suffice to say that Italy endured such pervasive conflict during those years (roughly 1969-1983) (Glynn 2009) that the labels „creeping civil war‟ or „low intensity civil war‟ are sometimes applied (cf. Centro Bull 2007: 8). Furthermore, it is now accepted that the Italian secret services covertly utilised neofascist groups to disrupt leftist activities in the 1970s and 80s (Ibid) as part of the „strategy of tension‟ used by the Italian state to counter leftist mobilisation. As these activities involved mass-casualty bombings, the use of violence by both sides can be understood to invite the description of „civil war‟.
Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past?
The experience of repeatedly listening to and transcribing interviews from both case studies has led me to note the politicality of what was being said. Many interviewees engaged in some level of politicisation of the present, whether through criticising other ex-militants post-conflict activities, challenging official representations of the conflict periods or through asserting that postconflict political situations are unjust. The practice of obtaining information about how interviewees became involved in violent groups was thus not just an „objective‟2 one; recollections of past events came packaged with political denunciations of the present.
George Orwell‟s maxim from 1984 (Orwell 1998), quoted above, is a useful introduction to the overlaps between political power and post-conflict memory. EOKA‟s struggle was influential in founding the Republic of Cyprus and the group‟s narrative has saturated the national project. Unlike the defeated anni di piombo groups, EOKA are involved with how the present and the
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Again, I am using „objective‟ to relate to activities of knowledge production about the past. I do not mean to imply that research can exist independently of perception or individual conceptions, rather this article adopts a critique of such a distinction between objectivity and politicality.
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past are governed in the Republic of Cyprus, through actual political appointments3 and because the narrative of their struggle is politically instituted in certain favourable ways (through official histories, memorials and statues). The governmental Council for the Historical Memory of EOKA, 1955-59 (SIMAE) has funded the opening of EOKA veteran‟s associations in Cypriot towns and cities, as well as memorial statues and museums to the struggle.4 The enosis narrative (Cyprus as ethnically and nationally Greek) borne by EOKA has also been instituted into educational programmes after the conclusion of the conflict; Yiannis Papadakis has noted that history textbooks in the Republic of Cyprus place the island within the tripartite Hellenic model of ancient Greece, „glorious Byzantine Empire‟ and modern Greece, and contain unequivocal statements concerning Cyprus‟s identity as „Greek and nothing but Greek‟ (Papadakis 2008: 131-2).
The place of EOKA in the governance of Cyprus‟ present and past contrasts greatly with the positions occupied by ex-Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and PAC members. My Italian interviewees had all served lengthy prison sentences, with one still finishing the community aspects of his sentence. Most worked in social cooperatives and interpreted this either as part of paying back a „debt to society‟ (Zaccheo 2010), or as a continuation of their left-wing social concerns – combined with the reality of employment options for ex-terrorists (as Susanna Ronconi joked: “it‟s the only field that would accept us! Let‟s be honest!”) (Ronconi 2010). Other interviewees worked in the private sector, while those involved in political parties and local government could still experience hostility based upon the perception of them as „terrorists‟. For example, negative material has appeared on the internet critiquing Sergio D‟Elia‟s election to Parliament, while Marco Solimano‟s nomination for political office has created a furore in Livorno despite his conviction being spent (Ristretti August 10, 2010; Solimano 2010).
These contrasting post-conflict positions for the organisations in Italy and Cyprus resulted in different (and political) understandings of history being displayed. EOKA interviewees had no
complaints about the way history is represented in the Republic of Cyprus, as they have centrally contributed to the national narrative. Furthermore, the level of homogeneity displayed and the
preponderance of a historical narrative within testimonies were startling; it was remarkable how many times the question „why did you join EOKA?‟ received a response that be gan by referencing the events of 1878 (when Britain took over the administration of Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire) and
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EOKA fighters to have held high political office in the Republic of Cyprus include Nicos Sampson, Glafcos Clerides and Tassos Papadopoulos. 4 I visited the EOKA museum in Nicosia during my fieldwork. Visitors pass through the exhibits, including photos and military memorabilia, until they reach the climax of the museum – the nooses used by the British authorities to hang EOKA fighters inside Nicosia prison.
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which then listed each historical disappointment to the nationalist cause, many of which occurred before interviewees were born. A comprehensive account of the past has been solidified, even down to the suspicious agreement on the numbers of Cypriots executed by EOKA as „traitors‟ – it being unlikely that records were kept of such things, mid-conflict. Despite this, multiple interviewees claimed that either 80 or 89 „traitors‟ had been executed and that, with effort, records could be uncovered to prove this.5
The past having been secured within the narratives and practices of the national project, EOKA interviewees instead used their testimonies to repoliticise the present. They recalled an
objective (knowable) past to problematise the present occupation of North Cyprus by Turkey and to occasionally label the contemporary Greek-Cypriot youth as apathetic, unpatriotic and interested only in „cafe-culture‟. The historical narrative of the heroic Hellenic male fighting for his country, which they inherited and then embodied6, was used to identify a contemporary Cyprus which fell short of its glorious past. Furthermore, while the Greek-Cypriot youth I spoke to were very reflexive regarding the partition of Cyprus, EOKA interviewees presented the occupation in terms of a long-standing stereotypical narrative about „Turks‟.
The appeals by EOKA to an objective history are thus tied into a political rendering of the present – both through the post-conflict solidification and homogenisation of narratives about the past, and through political critiques of the occupation by Turkey - centred on Cyprus‟ supposedly Hellenic history. As one interviewee stated:
In every country you go to, there are minorities. But they don‟t want to rule. Minority in Cyprus – here they want to [...] Go all over the island, find the ruins. Did they find any Ottoman ruins? [...] We have all the ruins of Cyprus, 2000 years before Christ. All over Cyprus [...] everywhere you see the temple of Apollo, of Aphrodite. (Sophocleous 2009)
Contrastingly, the politicisation undertaken by Italian interviewees presented a different relationship between testimony, politics and history. Rather than invoking a stabilised account of the
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However, I was never shown any records and my requests to see them at the EOKA Veteran’s Associations were gently avoided. 6 This is particularly relevant to the identity taken on by General Grivas, who led the EOKA organisation. During the insurgency Grivas operated under the identity of „Dighenis‟, Digenes Akritas being the mythical hero of a tenth-century epic set in Asia-Minor (Reddaway 1986: 207) who is held to have defended territory at the edge of the Byzantine Empire (Barker 1959: 93-5). The legend of Digenes held particular resonance for Hellenic narratives of Cyprus, as folklore attributes the presence of a mighty bolder off the South-Eastern coast of Cyprus to his physical prowess.
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past, the mutability and contestability of history often played central roles in these interviews. Interviewees were often very aware of how the dominant public narrative about the anni di piombo marginalises the experience of left-wing activists and downplays the scale of anti-capitalist protest in the 70s and 80s. These Italian interviewees offered testimony not to criticise present political arrangements – they had largely retreated to private lives and withdrawn from comment on politics – but to challenge public memory of the anni di piombo. Unlike the EOKA interviewees, who had firmly established their narrative of the past, ex-members of Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and PAC used their testimonies to politicise the historical record.
This politicisation occurred in two ways, through counter-histories of the anni di piombo (an appeal to an objective past) or through criticism of how the narrow public memory of the period serves contemporary political interests. While engaging with these tendencies it is important to note that the anni di piombo interviewees did not present a homogenous account of what happened; while the EOKA militants provided remarkably similar testimonies (following the public institution of their narrative), defeat has not led to a homogenisation of Italian ex-militant testimony. Rather, accounts of the past were far more heterogeneous.
Interviewees provided counter-narratives to dominant accounts of „Italian terrorism‟ which often repoliticised and challenged existing public histories; for example, the Italian state, covert neofascist apparatuses and even the CIA were implicated as bearing responsibility for provoking the conflict. These invocations of objective history were always presented with official qualities, through the mediums of newspaper reports about demonstrators killed by the police, carefully collected statistics of the deaths caused by state agents rather than activists, and historical examples of the Italian state‟s anti-democratic tendencies. Most of Roberto Ognibene‟s (a founder of Brigate Rosse) answers to questions relied upon an extensive counter-history, where he used objective appeals to the past to destabilise, and politically challenge, current popular memory. For example, he made an appeal to secret archives to challenge the official presentation of NATO as an implicitly honourable actor:
The fact was discovered when they opened the secret archive of the UK secret services, from which a document said that in ‟76, here, when the Communist Party had a majority of votes in the elections, that they [NATO] were considering organising a coup here in Italy. So this is the context. (Ognibene 2010)
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However, the heterogeneity of the anni di piombo testimonies also resulted in contrasting accounts which refused to apportion blame onto the state for the conflict. Against the tendency for interviewees to highlight police and state violence as factors in their „radicalisation‟, Maurice Bignami was keen for me to understand that the “urban guerrilla should not be read in a defensive sense”, rather that it was a “political instrument” (Bignami 2010). Another contrasting account came from Sergio D‟Elia, who stated that clandestine organisations were a consequence of the development of Italian mobilisation and its ideological basis‟. Rather than being understood as a reaction to state violence, he thought that activist violence was a „verifying demon‟ – a means of testing whether revolutionary conditions were present within society (D'Elia 2010).
These contradictions aside, Italian interviewees were more united when asserting that history reflects the interests of power. Their testimonies often provided both counter-histories of the anni di piombo and assertions that official narratives intentionally produce reductionist and simplistic accounts, because institutions “have interests in showing these movements like monsters, as if they had woken up one morning and had arms with them and decided to be violent” (Segio 2010). There were variations in how this political claim was made; some interviewees thought that blatant, intentional misinformation was undertaken by the state, while others hinted at more subtle procedures of history-production on the part of powerful interests. Susanna Ronconi, for example, expressed disappointment that clandestine activists have been denied their dignity as political militants, being portrayed instead as terrorists, and that the rare enquiries she receives from students mostly understand the anni di piombo at a surface level. For example, she stated:
Sometimes I‟m happy if I meet some young people who want to know and who want to ask me something, it‟s important for me [...] but they say „oh yes, Piazza Fontana, Brigate Rosse‟ [but] they don‟t know anything about the problem of our democracy.” (Ronconi 2010)
So; in experiencing defeat, militants were dispossessed of the ability to produce public narrative. They left prison to be confronted by accounts of history which they did not recognise. This apparently resulted in two strategies being used to unite personal recollections with official history: firstly, there was the approach of understanding official history to be political and intentionally narrow and exclusionary – a dominant perspective within my interview sample. As we have already seen, this led to the production of counter-narratives, through appeals to an objectively-experienced past, and also problematisation of the connections between power and public memory.
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Secondly and contrastingly, personal experience and official history could be reconciled through problematisation of self rather than of public narratives about the past. A number of interviewees framed their testimonies in terms of explaining their own „deviance‟, thereby accepting official narratives about the anni di piombo while presenting ideology as the reason for their very different subjectivities of the past. This perspective was adopted in different ways by three persons I spoke to, one of whom is now involved in pacifist politics and two of whom are now quite devout.
Contrastingly, the divergent post-conflict situation of EOKA interviewees meant that they faced few of these problems in governing public understanding of their struggle. They maintained stable and unproblematised subjectivities within their unbroken historical narrative. The effects of „semi-victory‟ and defeat upon subjectivity will be taken up after a brief discussion of references to objectivity made by Italian interviewees who, contrastingly, understand history to be mutable.
Objectivity in the Face of Mutability
As we have seen, the Italian interviewees who understood power and history as intertwined, who understood history as a political narrative linked to powerful interests, still made references to an objective past. Rather than relenting to the political ability of institutions to mould history as they choose, interviewees did not surrender the past. Instead they accepted my interview requests in order to publicise their own accounts of what happened in the 1970s and 80s. This was not an acceptance of history as entirely objective or as entirely political, but both – the testimonies embody a political challenge to other accounts of the past, through a history presented as objective.
These political appeals to objectivity were also apparent in repeated demands made by Italian interviewees that I use their names in publications. I was very surprised that ex-militants, who are often portrayed as monsters in their country, would not only refuse anonymity but also strongly advocate that I must use their names in order to secure objectivity for their accounts of the past. So, even when militants understood institutions to have moulded history beyond recognition, they retained some objective conception of the past – such that their names might signal objective experience of the anni di piombo, and thus „true‟ – or truer - history.
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On other occasions, it was made clear to me that I had been successful in obtaining interviews because I am not Italian. My status as an outsider appealed to several interviewees because they understood my geographical location to mean open-mindedness, and that public narratives and occasional hysteria about Italian terrorism would not have affected me. In the nicest possible way, I have been understood and used as an „objective‟ tool for the publicising of their (political) counterhistory.
Furthermore, coming out of the armed experience required interviewees to re-engage, to an extent, with official discourse. It is in this regard that I would like to posit a final point about simultaneously political and objective appeals to the past by Italian ex-militants. The process of „rethinking‟ participation in militancy was repeatedly brought up in interviews as a reintegration tool. Prima Linea undertook a collective „rethinking‟ of the armed struggle and of their ideas while incarcerated, but members of other groups also undertook personal journeys. These processes were always brought up in terms of re-integration into society and reconstruction of personal identity. They always involved some degree of admitting culpability and remorse, with either extreme feelings of guilt or more reserved admissions that the organisations had deviated from their original purposes.
I argue that these processes performed a function for defeated organisations – they enabled ex-militants to negotiate the clashing interpretations of history (official and clandestine), allowing them to move towards the official account by admitting responsibilities but not requiring them to surrender personal identity or memory. Susanna Ronconi emphasised to me how important it was for her to retain her past, despite feeling regret for many things, and how the rethinking process aimed at negotiating this quandary:
Our attitude was well, „we are guilty‟ and we wanted to say that we made a wrong choice, a choice that was defeated, but that we are still here and part of the history of this country, the political history of Italy, and that‟s important [...] I mean I know that I am guilty and that I have been wrong, but I have a personal and collective history which is inside the history of the political movement of our country, and for me it‟s important to know that. And it would be important also that other people could know that, but I‟m very pessimistic of this. (Ronconi 2010)
The processes of re-thinking allowed some degree of overlap between conflicting discourses about the anni di piombo to come into existence, an overlap which was workable and liveable, and 12
where reintegration and memory began to coexist. Here the partially political and partially objective understandings of history took shape. While understanding public memory of the anni di piombo to be shaped by powerful interests, interviewees could also adopt a position of reflexivity towards their own experiences – finding a middle ground between who they once were, remorse, and a refusal to accept the label of terrorist.
Through „rethinking‟, the knowable past was reconfigured through a distinction between „who I was then‟ and „who I am now‟. The past became objective in different way – it is still understood as knowable, but the narrative of what happened has been changed. For example, in the collective rethinking of the history of Prima Linea, it was necessary to amend the narrative to encompass defeat. Turning points had to be identified where the group „went wrong‟. Objective history changed in these projects of reintegration and of taking responsibility, and this rethinking complements a political refusal of the more exclusionary dimensions of official history. The popular history of the anni di piombo reveals fewer steps taken by institutions to accept their own responsibilities for the conflict, and is resented by ex-militants because of this. Maurice Bignami discussed how he risked his life during the rethinking process while the state was unable to accept its own responsibilities, and how Prima Linea mocked it for this failing:
We deconstructed the idea of the armed fight and reconstructed it in a different way [...so] the Brigatisti tried to kill me in the jail. And after the ‟86, disassociation is not only from the armed fight – but is from Marxism. Some of us, after ‟86, started a theoretical revision of our ideology. [... In the disassociation document of Prima Linea] we quoted a piece by „Farlosci‟ [a pun on „fallacy‟] – a fake author we made up – to say „we are nothing, but you are less than us‟; because we could at least reflect on ourselves, which other political classes cannot. (Bignami 2010)
Subjectivities after Defeat and after ‘Not-Quite-Defeat’
The processes of re-integration, re-thinking and defeat shaped the subjectivities of Italian interviewees in ways that were not mirrored in the case of EOKA. These factors will now be examined, before the conclusion of the article. Undertaking the Italian case study left me familiar with two narrative responses to defeat – a rethinking which balanced an amended objective history with a refusal of more exclusionary popular narratives, and a less prominent rethinking which narrated the past solely around explaining the interviewee‟s own deviance. I was shocked to return to the 13
EOKA testimonies and to see far lees reflexivity on display. The post-conflict ramifications of „semivictory‟ or „not-quite-defeat‟ appear to have had very different consequences for ex-militant subjectivities. Instead of releasing some of the antagonistic, and in some cases extreme, views which accompanied conflict, those views still appeared within testimonies. For example, fifty years after the end of the insurgency Renos Kyriakides still displayed dramatic contempt for the „traitors‟ (suspected collaborators) who were executed by EOKA:
We didn‟t have any Cypriot who didn‟t accept EOKA, but some were traitors. A number of them were dealt with properly [...] we killed them as traitors. (Kyriakides 2009)
Such ferocious statements about traitors to the national struggle, in addition to derogatory comments about Turkish-Cypriots as causes of instability in Cyprus, were made within a homogenous narrative which has apparently been stable since the end of the EOKA insurgency. The absence of defeat (although interviewees sometimes interpreted their failure to achieve „enosis‟ as a defeat) seems to have resulted in little mediation of the more extreme views, as ex-militant subjectivities have largely remained stable. Ex-militants have not needed to alter or mediate their perspective as they have been regarded as heroes since the conflict. As a result, fanciful views with little resemblance to reality were occasionally heard in the interviews – for example, when asked to clarify his statement about British de-Hellenisation tactics in Cyprus, Andreas Angelopoulos (in a seeming non sequitur) stated that “EOKA was ready since 1453, and 1821” (Angelopoulos 2009). While this was perhaps a rhetorical statement, it requires a mental commitment to understanding Hellenic nationalism to have existed hundreds of years before a Greek state did. It also requires a primordialist understanding of ethnicity (cf. Ozkirimli 2000), such that „Greek blood‟ inspired the actions of Cypriots just as it did revolutionaries who shook off the Ottoman empire in 1821.
This was not an isolated incident. The EOKA interviews cohered around these narratives and perceptions, which showed little change from the organisation‟s mantra in the 1950s. Conversely, the anni di piombo interviews cohered around commitments to rethinking opinions which were held in the past.7 These narrative coherences can be linked to the different post-conflict contexts inhabited by EOKA and anni di piombo ex-militants. In contexts where participation in a particular insurgency is glorified, protagonists can continuously embody this subjectivity – there is little need to renarrativise
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Although one interviewee, who asked to remain anonymous, appears to have „rethought‟ less than others have. While he accepted that the armed fight was no longer applicable, the interviewee refused to dissociate from it or to express any regret. He believed that the contextual applicability of armed struggle would return in the future, and that the anni di piombo legacy should be preserved as a heritage to those future generations („Maurizio‟ 2010).
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the past, although presumably some aspects of the EOKA struggle have been highlighted differently since the Turkish invasion of 1974. In contexts of defeat, where participation in militancy is viewed with hostility, it appears that protagonists experience a need to reintegrate into the discourse of their society.
This post-defeat need for change and „re-emergence‟ was poetically described by Nadia Mantovani, and I will quote her at length – because her words will communicate this more effectively than mine:
While in prison, I began a process of non-identification and departure/estrangement [allontanamento] from my organisation [...] I began a personal journey which involved a political assessment and some existential rethinking, a process that was very painful, lasted several years, and was made even more difficult by the fact that it was taking place in prison [...] I did not allow myself to become a part of [non-violent activism within the prison], due to my visceral refusal of any form of collectivism. [...] Inside of me there was no desire. So I locked myself up and floundered a lot, before managing to get myself out of this spiral of depression and negativity. I have been helped by some people [...] and probably also by the evolution of the times. When the dissociation law was passed, I was at the beginning of the re-emergence process... (Mantovani 2010)
Conclusion
This article has compared interview transcripts from two very different post-conflict contexts. It has found that interviewee‟s appeals to an objectively-understood past often come packaged within political denunciations of the present. Furthermore the subjectivities of ex-militants from the EOKA and anni di piombo conflicts seem to cohere around the experiences of „se mi-victory‟ and defeat. Perspectives on the past thus appear embedded within contemporary contexts; narratives were either constructed around a search for explanations of previous behaviour (viewed as interesting, or even deviant, from their contemporary private lives) or were unreflexive and sometimes dogmatic (as was witnessed in the „semi-victorious‟ EOKA interviews). These findings might have interesting
repercussions for the use of interviewing within studies of contentious politics. Not only do they inform methodological debates about the relationship of interviews to the („objective‟) past, but they could open Social Movement research to the narrative studies approach in order to embrace the intrinsic politicality of memory.
15
The finding which I would most like to highlight, however, concerns the connection between ex-militant‟s worldviews and post-conflict contexts. While Social Movement studies of contentious politics can understand ideology as a functional tool used by organisations to explain and mediate isolation and to alleviate distress at violent conduct (Della Porta 1992b), the continuing adherence of EOKA interviewees to militant frames in times of peace points to a need for further research. If militant perceptions were inculcated by the clandestine organisations for functional reasons, how can we explain their continued presence fifty years after the EOKA insurgency ended?
The testimonies of anni di piombo and EOKA interviews do not reveal a post-conflict return to a comparatively apolitical stance, so the functional formulation of ideology in contentious politics research may need to be reconsidered. I will conclude by suggesting that rather than considering perceptions of the word as ideas, ideology or frames, it might be fruitful to engage with the literature on subjectivity – and how perception and knowledge are always socially and politically produced. This literature understands the Cartesian subject – who can use rational powers to deduce objective truth – as a fiction carried forth from the Enlightenment. Instead, it understands what we say, how we think and what we know to always be performances of discourses which precede us (cf. Bell 1999; Foucault 2001; Hall 1992). These types of approaches may be useful for examining how post-conflict subjectivities are produced – either where the possession of power and the ability to make popular memory result in the continuation of militant narratives, or where subjection after defeat results in reevaluation of worldview and fractures in subjectivity. This type of approach may also assist researchers to cope with the simultaneous politicality and objective deployment of „history‟ as a narrative through which parties govern the present and the past.
References Books and Articles Barker, Dudley (1959) Grivas: Portrait of a Terrorist (London: Cresset Press). Bell, Vikki (ed) (1999) Performativity and Belonging (London: Sage). Blee, Kathleen M. and Taylor, Verta (2002) 'Semi-Structured Interviewing in Social Movement Research', in Bert Klandermans and Suzanne Staggenborg (eds), Methods of Social Movement Research (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press): 92-117. Cameron, James (1971) 'Introduction', in Procopias Nichola Vanezis (ed), Makarios: Faith and Power (London: Abelard-Schuman): 11-14. Castellano, Lucio, Cavallina, Arrigo, Cortiana, Giustino, Dalmaviva, Mario, Ferrari Bravo, Luciano, Funaro, Chicco, Negri, Toni, Pozzi, Paolo, Tommei, Franco, Vesce, Emilio and Virno, Paolo (1983) 16
'Do You Remember Revolution?', in Antonio Negri (ed), Diary of An Escape (2010) (Cambridge: Polity Press): 35-49. Centro Bull, Anna (2007) Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation (Oxford: Berghahn). della Porta, Donatella (1992a) 'Political Socialisation in Left-Wing Underground Organizations: Biographies of Italian and German Militants', in Donatella della Porta (ed), Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organizations; International Social Movement Research, Volume 4 (London: JAI Press): 259-90. Della Porta, Donatella (1992b) 'Introduction: On Individual Motivations in Underground Political Organisations', in Donatella Della Porta (ed), Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organisations; International Social Movement Research, Volume 4 (London: JAI Press): 3-28. Della Porta, Donatella (1995) Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Della Porta, Donatella and Tarrow, Sidney (1986) 'Unwanted children: Political violence and the cycle of protest in Italy, 1966–1973', European Journal of Political Research 14/5-6: 607-32. Drake, Richard (1989) The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Indiana: Indiana University Press). Foucault, Michel (2001) The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Abingdon: Routledge). Glynn, Ruth (2009) 'Writing the Terrorist Self: The Unspeakable Alterity of Italy‟s Female Perpetrators', Feminist Review 92: 1-18. Grivas, George (1964) The Memoirs of General Grivas (London: Longmans). Hall, Stuart (1992) 'The Question of Cultural Identity', in Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Futures; Understanding Modern Societies, An Introduction, Book 4 (Cambridge: Polity Press): 273-326. Held, David (1980) Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press). Holland, Robert F. and Markides, Diana Weston (2006) The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Horgan, John (2004) 'The Case for Firsthand Research', in Andrew Silke (ed), Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements & Failures (Abingdon: Frank Cass): 30-56. Horkheimer, Max (2002) 'Traditional and Critical Theory', in, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum): 188-243. Jackson, Richard, Breen-Smyth, Marie and Gunning, Jeroen (eds) (2009) Critical Terrorism Studies: A Research Agenda (Abingdon: Routledge).
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Johnson, Richard and Dawson, Graham (1998) 'Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method', in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge): 75-86. Loizos, Peter (1975) The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot Village (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Markides, Kyriacos C. (1977) The Rise and Fall of the Cyprus Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press). Mayes, Stanley (1981) Makarios: A Biography (London: Macmillan Press). Orwell, George (1998) Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin). Ozkirimli, Umut (2000) Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Papadakis, Yiannis (2008) 'Narrative, Memory and History Education in Divided Cyprus: A Comparison of Schoolbooks on the “History of Cyprus”', History & Memory 20/2: 128-48. Passerini, Luisa (1992) 'Lacerations in the Memory: Women in the Italian Underground Organizations', in Donatella Della Porta (ed), Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organizations; International Social Movement Research, Volume 4 (London: JAI Press): 161-212. Reddaway, John (1986) Burdened with Cyprus: The British Connection (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Ristretti (August 10, 2010) 'Livorno: Marco Solimano nominato Garante dei diritti dei detenuti', in, http://www.ristretti.org/Le-Notizie-di-Ristretti/livorno-marco-solimano-nominato-garante-dei-dirittidei-detenuti. Tarrow, Sidney (1989) Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy 1965-1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Tarrow, Sidney (1991) 'Violence and Institutionalization after the Italian Protest Cycle', in Raimondo Catanzaro (ed), The Red Brigades and Left-Wing Terrorism in Italy (London: Pinter): 41-69. Theodoulou, Jacqueline (03 April 2008) 'Extremists heckle Christofias at EOKA memorial (http://www.pseka.net/news/index.php?module=article&id=8132)', Coordinating Committee: Justice for Cyprus. Thomson, Alistair (1998) 'ANZAC Memories: Putting Popular Memory Theory into Practice in Australia', in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader (London: Routledge): 244-54. Tofallis, Kypros (2002) A History of Cyprus: From the Ancient times to the Present, An Illustrated History, (London: The Greek Institute). Vanezis, Procopias Nichola (1971) Makarios: Faith and Power (London: Abelard-Schuman). White, Robert W. (2007) ''I'm not too sure what I told you the last time': Methodological Notes on Accounts from High-Risk Activists in the Irish Republican Movement', Mobilization: An International Quarterly Review 12/3: 287-305. Xydis, Stephen G. (1967) Cyprus: Conflict and Conciliation 1954-1958 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press). 18 in, PSEKA: International
Interviews
Cyprus Angelopoulos, Andreas (24/11/2009), Limassol. Batarias, Charalambos (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Christodoulidou, Ellie (25/11/2009), Limassol. Christodoulides, Marios (25/11/2009), Limassol. Efstathiou, Augoustis (20/11/2009), Nicosia. Gregoras, Gregoris Louca (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Karlettides, Sophoulis (25/11/2009), Limassol. Kassinis, Ioannis (26/11/2009), Limassol. Kyriakides, Renos (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Papares, Avgerinos (25/11/2009), Limassol. Sophocleous, Thassos (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Stephou, Spyros (19/11/2009), Nicosia. Stephou, Maria (19/11/2009), Nicosia. Spanos, Yannis (20/11/2009), Nicosia. Varravas, Eliana (26/11/2009), Limassol. Varravas, Christakis (26/11/2009), Limassol.
Italy Bignami, Maurice (21/07/2010), Rome. Cavallina, Arrigo (17/07/2010), Verona. Cotone, Anna (24/07/2010), Rome. D‟Elia, Sergio (22/07/2010), Rome. Mantovani, Nadia (16/07/2010), Bologna. „Maurizio‟ (22/07/2010), Rome. Nicolotti, Luca (15/07/2010), Turin. Ognibene, Roberto (16/07/2010), Bologna. Ronconi, Susanna (15/07/2010), Turin. Segio, Sergio (14/07/2010), Milan. Solimano, Marco (19/07/2010), Livorno. Zaccheo, Ettorina (14/07/2010), Milan.
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Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, [email protected]
Abstact: This article presents interview material obtained on fieldwork visits to the Republic of Cyprus and Italy between 2009 and 2010. Ex-militants from four clandestine groups (EOKA, Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and Proletari Armati per il Comunismo) were asked to speak about their entry to and participation in those organisations. The article reflects on how narratives given by EOKA and anni di piombo militants about the past appear to be affected by contemporary resistances and struggles. The politicality of their narratives, and of their perceptions of history, are linked to contrasting post-conflict contexts: the anni di piombo groups experienced resounding defeat and imprisonment whereas EOKA members have enjoyed the status of freedom-fighters. The divergent effects of these outcomes upon narrative, subjectivity and references to history are centrally addressed. The article concludes by discussing the implications for interviewing practice in contentious politics research.
Introduction – The Interview in Political Violence Research
In the year 1983, eleven imprisoned autonomist activists (including the noted theorists Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno) authored a document entitled „Do You Remember Revolution?‟ The article was presented as an attempt to reclaim the history of the autonomist movement from Italy‟s „pentiti‟ phenomenon, from „memory distortion and conformity‟, and from a judicial desire to „equate subversion with terrorism‟ (Castellano et al. 1983). The attempt was both an objective and a political endeavour – objective because the activists understood history to be knowable and reclaimable from distortion, and political because history was presented as a gift for future revolutionary struggles.
The study of political violence often produces knowledge about past events but is rarely as bold as this invocation of history as both political and objective, although the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists provide the archetypal example of this in wider social science/philosophy (cf. Held 1980: 148-74; Horkheimer 2002). The study of contentious politics, within Social Movement Studies, and the field of Terrorism Studies split the concepts, attributing politicality to the groups they study 1
and associating efforts for objectivity with their own projects. „Objectivity‟ is not used here to suggest that these scholars understand their research to uncover timeless truths, but rather that the study of political violence is undertaken to produce knowledge about the causes of terrorism. „Objectivity‟, then, is used to note positivist inclinations to understand history as knowable (rather than as irredeemably constructed).
This kind of separation between politicality and objectivity in terrorism research is problematised in one way by the Critical Terrorism Studies project, which shows how the work of terrorism scholars is intensely political in its search for the „objective‟ causes of terrorism, through its reproduction of certain discourses about legitimate authority and practices (cf. Jackson et al. 2009). This will not be the direction taken in this article, though. Instead of addressing the practices of scholars I will consider the mutuality of politicality and objectivity within the testimonies of exmilitants, particularly relative to the practice of interviewing.
The Social Movement literatures on political violence and contentious politics often engage with autobiographical testimony to enrich analyses, something undertaken more infrequently within the field of Terrorism Studies – to its detriment (Horgan 2004). When interviewing is undertaken,
the testimonies of militants and ex-militants are understood relative to their relationship with past events (cf. Blee and Taylor 2002; della Porta 1992a; White 2007). As such, studies using interviews with protagonists consider methodological issues regarding the relationship between testimony and events. Robert White, for example, problematises features of interviewing like miscommunication between interviewee and researcher, the potentially fallible memories of interviewees, the reflection of personal bias in testimony and the unconscious reworking of historical facts to make them fit into a coherent sequence (White 2007). These understandings of interviewing consider the objectivity of what is said (how it relates to a knowable past), but not its politicality.
A consideration of how ex-militants narrate their experiences will be embarked upon here to „muddy the waters‟ between objectivity and politicality in memory and narrative. This is a different type of approach to conventional Social Movement and Terrorism Studies research then, as it will involve reflection upon the politicality of interviewee testimony rather than how it represents past events. The study of how people speak about the past is known as „collective memory research‟, „narrative studies‟ and „oral history‟ – when such history focuses on popular memory as a contemporary object of study (cf. Johnson and Dawson 1998). This type of research looks at the
2
political roles played by popular memory, like the linking of past events with contemporary political and cultural narratives and how changing cultural contexts affect the remembering of past events.
In terms of political violence and contentious politics, examining how interviewees talk about the past can reveal much about the production of subjectivity in post-conflict situations. Research of this type has been undertaken by Luisa Passerini, who has conducted oral history studies with incarcerated women from clandestine Italian organisations such as Brigate Rosse and Prima Linea. She found important differences in the types of narratives produced in textual and oral testimony, and in the levels of memory accessible to the women in situations of incarceration and subsequent freedom (Passerini 1992), subjective location thereby affecting portrayals of the past. Like Passerini, I have conducted interviews with ex-members of Italian underground organisations. In 2010, I spoke to ex-militants from the Marxist-Leninist group Brigate Rosse (including one founding member), and from Prima Linea and PAC.1 In examining how post-conflict situation influences narratives about involvement in political violence, I will compare the testimonies of Italian interviewees with those of EOKA fighters – which I collected on fieldwork in the Republic of Cyprus in 2009.
The comparison between protagonists of these conflicts is interesting because their postconflict contexts differ so much, and through these contrasts I can examine the types of narratives and testimonies provided relative to context. While it would be a stretch to attribute victory to the EOKA organisation, EOKA members were not imprisoned after the conclusion of their clandestine struggle like the Italian militants were. Instead they enjoyed a legacy as freedom-fighters in post-colonial Greek-Cyprus - a narrative still endorsed by both political elites and right-wing political opinion in Cyprus in the years after occupation by Turkey. For example, memorial services for EOKA fighters killed during the struggle still attract high-level political delegations (cf. Theodoulou 03 April 2008), and I witnessed this at a service inside Nicosia prison for the „martyred‟ EOKA fighter Kyriakos Matsis while conducting fieldwork in Cyprus. The prison warden who accompanied me identified the Archbishop of Cyprus, the Defence Minister, and other prominent politicians of the Republic in attendance. Conversely, Italian interviewees served long prison sentences before
speaking to me and are portrayed in the media as terrorists, even to this day.
This article, then, focuses on how ex-militant testimonies mirror their post-conflict contexts. It finds that the testimonies and subjectivities of interviewees reflect profound differences between the
1
One PAC interviewee contributed to the autonomi document „Do You Remember Revolution‟ quoted at the beginning of this article.
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semi-victorious and defeated case studies. The EOKA fighters described their experiences in terms of a continuous nationalist narrative, whereas the marginalised social positions of Italian ex-militants contributed to a more fractured account of self and of the decision to adopt armed struggle. „Victory‟, or perhaps the absence of defeat, has institutionalised the EOKA narrative and led to a homogenous (and exclusionary) portrayal of the past by unreflexive participants. Conversely, experiencing defeat has led the anni di piombo militants to reflect upon their actions, largely with some degree of regret and remorse, in heterogeneous and fractured ways. In both case studies, objective claims about history operated as political tools – anni di piombo militants invoked history to open up popular understandings of the 1970s and 80s, whereas the narrative of EOKA has been used to close down understandings of Cypriot nationhood.
Cyprus and Italy
As this is a short article I must assume a considerable amount of knowledge about the anticolonial struggle in Cyprus and the anni di piombo in Italy. In this section I will provide some brief contextual and historical information about both, and indicate material for further reading.
While there has been a long history of anti-colonial struggle in Cyprus, the domination of the island by foreign powers goes back considerably further. For instance Kypros Tofallis has noted the formation of clandestine organisations as far back as 1879, the year after Cyprus became administered by Britain (Tofallis 2002: 82), but British control of Cyprus was preceded by successive conquests of the island by “Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Persians, Ptolemaic Greeks, Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Arabs, Franks, Venetians and Turks” (Mayes 1981: 13).
The escalation of agitation for „enosis‟ (accession to the Greek state) under British rule is connected by scholars to efforts to politically secularise the island. Under Ottoman rule, the Cypriot Church had enjoyed the position of sole political representative of the Greek community, but the British administration severed the links between the Church and tax collection, introduced a legislative assembly with secular representatives and removed certain educational privileges of the Church (Loizos 1975: 14; Markides 1977). Unrepresentative governance preceded an uprising in
4
1931 where Government House was burned down and the subsequent repression implemented by the British authorities contributed to festering tensions on the island (Cameron 1971).
After participating in World War Two, when Cypriots responded to an apparent offer of national freedom by the British authorities (Holland and Markides 2006: 215), mass mobilisation reemerged in a novel climate of political openness in Cyprus where, for the first time, political parties and left-wing trade unions were allowed to flourish on the island, destabilising the traditional hierarchies of power. Archbishop Makarios and his council, perhaps threatened by this, began fostering the nationalist movement and oversaw a close relationship between the enosis campaign and the Cypriot Church (cf. Grivas 1964; Mayes 1981; Vanezis 1971; Xydis 1967: 29-30, 69-70). After the failures of attempts to obtain international sympathy for Cyprus‟ colonial predicament (Makarios undertook international tours, organised a referendum on independence and even managed to get the Cyprus question debated by the United Nations), the Archbishop authorised the start of the EOKA insurgency, which began with sabotage explosions across Cyprus on 1st April, 1955. After four years of guerrilla warfare in the Troodos mountains and urban assassination campaigns against police officers and British soldiers, EOKA succeeded in removing the British administration from the island (apart from several sovereign military bases) but union with Greece – their stated aim – was never achieved.
Regarding some key features of the contemporary Cypriot context, which informed the testimonies I collected, the post-colonial Republic of Cyprus was born in 1960 and was led by Archbishop Makarios until he was deposed in 1974‟s coup d‟état (organised by the dictatorship of „colonels‟ in Athens). An invasion of northern Cyprus by Turkish forces swiftly followed. Makarios returned to the Cypriot Presidency to lead efforts to dismantle the national partition until his death in 1977 (Mayes 1981: viii-ix), but northern Cyprus remains occupied by Turkey to this day. This was a matter of great significance to my EOKA interviewees who had risked their lives between 1955 and 1959 to be rid of occupation. Complicated dynamics also underscored their understandings of the „Cyprus problem‟; the (revered) leader of EOKA, General Grivas, was involved in this ill-fated and destructive coup d‟état which provoked the Turkish invasion. As such, interviewees resented the Turkish occupation but their testimonies were sometimes underscored by confusion about how the enosis project (to unite Cyprus with Greece) had gone so wrong. Rather than introducing reflection upon the role of EOKA in escalating ethnic tensions though, this confusion was resolved in interviews through demonization of „the Turks‟.
5
Ten years after the end of the EOKA militancy, Italy was experiencing the „Hot Autumn‟ of 1969. This was a period of intense industrial unrest, where cooperation between the student
movements of 1968 and factory workers led to strikes and mass mobilisation (Della Porta 1995: 1089; Drake 1989: 1-2). Social Movement research has detailed the opportunity structures, protest cycles and pressures which led to the emergence of violent factions within leftist mobilisation in Italy (cf. Della Porta 1995; Della Porta and Tarrow 1986; Tarrow 1989; Tarrow 1991). In an article of this length I must assume considerable familiarity with the anni di piombo, suffice to say that Italy endured such pervasive conflict during those years (roughly 1969-1983) (Glynn 2009) that the labels „creeping civil war‟ or „low intensity civil war‟ are sometimes applied (cf. Centro Bull 2007: 8). Furthermore, it is now accepted that the Italian secret services covertly utilised neofascist groups to disrupt leftist activities in the 1970s and 80s (Ibid) as part of the „strategy of tension‟ used by the Italian state to counter leftist mobilisation. As these activities involved mass-casualty bombings, the use of violence by both sides can be understood to invite the description of „civil war‟.
Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past?
The experience of repeatedly listening to and transcribing interviews from both case studies has led me to note the politicality of what was being said. Many interviewees engaged in some level of politicisation of the present, whether through criticising other ex-militants post-conflict activities, challenging official representations of the conflict periods or through asserting that postconflict political situations are unjust. The practice of obtaining information about how interviewees became involved in violent groups was thus not just an „objective‟2 one; recollections of past events came packaged with political denunciations of the present.
George Orwell‟s maxim from 1984 (Orwell 1998), quoted above, is a useful introduction to the overlaps between political power and post-conflict memory. EOKA‟s struggle was influential in founding the Republic of Cyprus and the group‟s narrative has saturated the national project. Unlike the defeated anni di piombo groups, EOKA are involved with how the present and the
2
Again, I am using „objective‟ to relate to activities of knowledge production about the past. I do not mean to imply that research can exist independently of perception or individual conceptions, rather this article adopts a critique of such a distinction between objectivity and politicality.
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past are governed in the Republic of Cyprus, through actual political appointments3 and because the narrative of their struggle is politically instituted in certain favourable ways (through official histories, memorials and statues). The governmental Council for the Historical Memory of EOKA, 1955-59 (SIMAE) has funded the opening of EOKA veteran‟s associations in Cypriot towns and cities, as well as memorial statues and museums to the struggle.4 The enosis narrative (Cyprus as ethnically and nationally Greek) borne by EOKA has also been instituted into educational programmes after the conclusion of the conflict; Yiannis Papadakis has noted that history textbooks in the Republic of Cyprus place the island within the tripartite Hellenic model of ancient Greece, „glorious Byzantine Empire‟ and modern Greece, and contain unequivocal statements concerning Cyprus‟s identity as „Greek and nothing but Greek‟ (Papadakis 2008: 131-2).
The place of EOKA in the governance of Cyprus‟ present and past contrasts greatly with the positions occupied by ex-Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and PAC members. My Italian interviewees had all served lengthy prison sentences, with one still finishing the community aspects of his sentence. Most worked in social cooperatives and interpreted this either as part of paying back a „debt to society‟ (Zaccheo 2010), or as a continuation of their left-wing social concerns – combined with the reality of employment options for ex-terrorists (as Susanna Ronconi joked: “it‟s the only field that would accept us! Let‟s be honest!”) (Ronconi 2010). Other interviewees worked in the private sector, while those involved in political parties and local government could still experience hostility based upon the perception of them as „terrorists‟. For example, negative material has appeared on the internet critiquing Sergio D‟Elia‟s election to Parliament, while Marco Solimano‟s nomination for political office has created a furore in Livorno despite his conviction being spent (Ristretti August 10, 2010; Solimano 2010).
These contrasting post-conflict positions for the organisations in Italy and Cyprus resulted in different (and political) understandings of history being displayed. EOKA interviewees had no
complaints about the way history is represented in the Republic of Cyprus, as they have centrally contributed to the national narrative. Furthermore, the level of homogeneity displayed and the
preponderance of a historical narrative within testimonies were startling; it was remarkable how many times the question „why did you join EOKA?‟ received a response that be gan by referencing the events of 1878 (when Britain took over the administration of Cyprus from the Ottoman Empire) and
3
EOKA fighters to have held high political office in the Republic of Cyprus include Nicos Sampson, Glafcos Clerides and Tassos Papadopoulos. 4 I visited the EOKA museum in Nicosia during my fieldwork. Visitors pass through the exhibits, including photos and military memorabilia, until they reach the climax of the museum – the nooses used by the British authorities to hang EOKA fighters inside Nicosia prison.
7
which then listed each historical disappointment to the nationalist cause, many of which occurred before interviewees were born. A comprehensive account of the past has been solidified, even down to the suspicious agreement on the numbers of Cypriots executed by EOKA as „traitors‟ – it being unlikely that records were kept of such things, mid-conflict. Despite this, multiple interviewees claimed that either 80 or 89 „traitors‟ had been executed and that, with effort, records could be uncovered to prove this.5
The past having been secured within the narratives and practices of the national project, EOKA interviewees instead used their testimonies to repoliticise the present. They recalled an
objective (knowable) past to problematise the present occupation of North Cyprus by Turkey and to occasionally label the contemporary Greek-Cypriot youth as apathetic, unpatriotic and interested only in „cafe-culture‟. The historical narrative of the heroic Hellenic male fighting for his country, which they inherited and then embodied6, was used to identify a contemporary Cyprus which fell short of its glorious past. Furthermore, while the Greek-Cypriot youth I spoke to were very reflexive regarding the partition of Cyprus, EOKA interviewees presented the occupation in terms of a long-standing stereotypical narrative about „Turks‟.
The appeals by EOKA to an objective history are thus tied into a political rendering of the present – both through the post-conflict solidification and homogenisation of narratives about the past, and through political critiques of the occupation by Turkey - centred on Cyprus‟ supposedly Hellenic history. As one interviewee stated:
In every country you go to, there are minorities. But they don‟t want to rule. Minority in Cyprus – here they want to [...] Go all over the island, find the ruins. Did they find any Ottoman ruins? [...] We have all the ruins of Cyprus, 2000 years before Christ. All over Cyprus [...] everywhere you see the temple of Apollo, of Aphrodite. (Sophocleous 2009)
Contrastingly, the politicisation undertaken by Italian interviewees presented a different relationship between testimony, politics and history. Rather than invoking a stabilised account of the
5
However, I was never shown any records and my requests to see them at the EOKA Veteran’s Associations were gently avoided. 6 This is particularly relevant to the identity taken on by General Grivas, who led the EOKA organisation. During the insurgency Grivas operated under the identity of „Dighenis‟, Digenes Akritas being the mythical hero of a tenth-century epic set in Asia-Minor (Reddaway 1986: 207) who is held to have defended territory at the edge of the Byzantine Empire (Barker 1959: 93-5). The legend of Digenes held particular resonance for Hellenic narratives of Cyprus, as folklore attributes the presence of a mighty bolder off the South-Eastern coast of Cyprus to his physical prowess.
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past, the mutability and contestability of history often played central roles in these interviews. Interviewees were often very aware of how the dominant public narrative about the anni di piombo marginalises the experience of left-wing activists and downplays the scale of anti-capitalist protest in the 70s and 80s. These Italian interviewees offered testimony not to criticise present political arrangements – they had largely retreated to private lives and withdrawn from comment on politics – but to challenge public memory of the anni di piombo. Unlike the EOKA interviewees, who had firmly established their narrative of the past, ex-members of Brigate Rosse, Prima Linea and PAC used their testimonies to politicise the historical record.
This politicisation occurred in two ways, through counter-histories of the anni di piombo (an appeal to an objective past) or through criticism of how the narrow public memory of the period serves contemporary political interests. While engaging with these tendencies it is important to note that the anni di piombo interviewees did not present a homogenous account of what happened; while the EOKA militants provided remarkably similar testimonies (following the public institution of their narrative), defeat has not led to a homogenisation of Italian ex-militant testimony. Rather, accounts of the past were far more heterogeneous.
Interviewees provided counter-narratives to dominant accounts of „Italian terrorism‟ which often repoliticised and challenged existing public histories; for example, the Italian state, covert neofascist apparatuses and even the CIA were implicated as bearing responsibility for provoking the conflict. These invocations of objective history were always presented with official qualities, through the mediums of newspaper reports about demonstrators killed by the police, carefully collected statistics of the deaths caused by state agents rather than activists, and historical examples of the Italian state‟s anti-democratic tendencies. Most of Roberto Ognibene‟s (a founder of Brigate Rosse) answers to questions relied upon an extensive counter-history, where he used objective appeals to the past to destabilise, and politically challenge, current popular memory. For example, he made an appeal to secret archives to challenge the official presentation of NATO as an implicitly honourable actor:
The fact was discovered when they opened the secret archive of the UK secret services, from which a document said that in ‟76, here, when the Communist Party had a majority of votes in the elections, that they [NATO] were considering organising a coup here in Italy. So this is the context. (Ognibene 2010)
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However, the heterogeneity of the anni di piombo testimonies also resulted in contrasting accounts which refused to apportion blame onto the state for the conflict. Against the tendency for interviewees to highlight police and state violence as factors in their „radicalisation‟, Maurice Bignami was keen for me to understand that the “urban guerrilla should not be read in a defensive sense”, rather that it was a “political instrument” (Bignami 2010). Another contrasting account came from Sergio D‟Elia, who stated that clandestine organisations were a consequence of the development of Italian mobilisation and its ideological basis‟. Rather than being understood as a reaction to state violence, he thought that activist violence was a „verifying demon‟ – a means of testing whether revolutionary conditions were present within society (D'Elia 2010).
These contradictions aside, Italian interviewees were more united when asserting that history reflects the interests of power. Their testimonies often provided both counter-histories of the anni di piombo and assertions that official narratives intentionally produce reductionist and simplistic accounts, because institutions “have interests in showing these movements like monsters, as if they had woken up one morning and had arms with them and decided to be violent” (Segio 2010). There were variations in how this political claim was made; some interviewees thought that blatant, intentional misinformation was undertaken by the state, while others hinted at more subtle procedures of history-production on the part of powerful interests. Susanna Ronconi, for example, expressed disappointment that clandestine activists have been denied their dignity as political militants, being portrayed instead as terrorists, and that the rare enquiries she receives from students mostly understand the anni di piombo at a surface level. For example, she stated:
Sometimes I‟m happy if I meet some young people who want to know and who want to ask me something, it‟s important for me [...] but they say „oh yes, Piazza Fontana, Brigate Rosse‟ [but] they don‟t know anything about the problem of our democracy.” (Ronconi 2010)
So; in experiencing defeat, militants were dispossessed of the ability to produce public narrative. They left prison to be confronted by accounts of history which they did not recognise. This apparently resulted in two strategies being used to unite personal recollections with official history: firstly, there was the approach of understanding official history to be political and intentionally narrow and exclusionary – a dominant perspective within my interview sample. As we have already seen, this led to the production of counter-narratives, through appeals to an objectively-experienced past, and also problematisation of the connections between power and public memory.
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Secondly and contrastingly, personal experience and official history could be reconciled through problematisation of self rather than of public narratives about the past. A number of interviewees framed their testimonies in terms of explaining their own „deviance‟, thereby accepting official narratives about the anni di piombo while presenting ideology as the reason for their very different subjectivities of the past. This perspective was adopted in different ways by three persons I spoke to, one of whom is now involved in pacifist politics and two of whom are now quite devout.
Contrastingly, the divergent post-conflict situation of EOKA interviewees meant that they faced few of these problems in governing public understanding of their struggle. They maintained stable and unproblematised subjectivities within their unbroken historical narrative. The effects of „semi-victory‟ and defeat upon subjectivity will be taken up after a brief discussion of references to objectivity made by Italian interviewees who, contrastingly, understand history to be mutable.
Objectivity in the Face of Mutability
As we have seen, the Italian interviewees who understood power and history as intertwined, who understood history as a political narrative linked to powerful interests, still made references to an objective past. Rather than relenting to the political ability of institutions to mould history as they choose, interviewees did not surrender the past. Instead they accepted my interview requests in order to publicise their own accounts of what happened in the 1970s and 80s. This was not an acceptance of history as entirely objective or as entirely political, but both – the testimonies embody a political challenge to other accounts of the past, through a history presented as objective.
These political appeals to objectivity were also apparent in repeated demands made by Italian interviewees that I use their names in publications. I was very surprised that ex-militants, who are often portrayed as monsters in their country, would not only refuse anonymity but also strongly advocate that I must use their names in order to secure objectivity for their accounts of the past. So, even when militants understood institutions to have moulded history beyond recognition, they retained some objective conception of the past – such that their names might signal objective experience of the anni di piombo, and thus „true‟ – or truer - history.
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On other occasions, it was made clear to me that I had been successful in obtaining interviews because I am not Italian. My status as an outsider appealed to several interviewees because they understood my geographical location to mean open-mindedness, and that public narratives and occasional hysteria about Italian terrorism would not have affected me. In the nicest possible way, I have been understood and used as an „objective‟ tool for the publicising of their (political) counterhistory.
Furthermore, coming out of the armed experience required interviewees to re-engage, to an extent, with official discourse. It is in this regard that I would like to posit a final point about simultaneously political and objective appeals to the past by Italian ex-militants. The process of „rethinking‟ participation in militancy was repeatedly brought up in interviews as a reintegration tool. Prima Linea undertook a collective „rethinking‟ of the armed struggle and of their ideas while incarcerated, but members of other groups also undertook personal journeys. These processes were always brought up in terms of re-integration into society and reconstruction of personal identity. They always involved some degree of admitting culpability and remorse, with either extreme feelings of guilt or more reserved admissions that the organisations had deviated from their original purposes.
I argue that these processes performed a function for defeated organisations – they enabled ex-militants to negotiate the clashing interpretations of history (official and clandestine), allowing them to move towards the official account by admitting responsibilities but not requiring them to surrender personal identity or memory. Susanna Ronconi emphasised to me how important it was for her to retain her past, despite feeling regret for many things, and how the rethinking process aimed at negotiating this quandary:
Our attitude was well, „we are guilty‟ and we wanted to say that we made a wrong choice, a choice that was defeated, but that we are still here and part of the history of this country, the political history of Italy, and that‟s important [...] I mean I know that I am guilty and that I have been wrong, but I have a personal and collective history which is inside the history of the political movement of our country, and for me it‟s important to know that. And it would be important also that other people could know that, but I‟m very pessimistic of this. (Ronconi 2010)
The processes of re-thinking allowed some degree of overlap between conflicting discourses about the anni di piombo to come into existence, an overlap which was workable and liveable, and 12
where reintegration and memory began to coexist. Here the partially political and partially objective understandings of history took shape. While understanding public memory of the anni di piombo to be shaped by powerful interests, interviewees could also adopt a position of reflexivity towards their own experiences – finding a middle ground between who they once were, remorse, and a refusal to accept the label of terrorist.
Through „rethinking‟, the knowable past was reconfigured through a distinction between „who I was then‟ and „who I am now‟. The past became objective in different way – it is still understood as knowable, but the narrative of what happened has been changed. For example, in the collective rethinking of the history of Prima Linea, it was necessary to amend the narrative to encompass defeat. Turning points had to be identified where the group „went wrong‟. Objective history changed in these projects of reintegration and of taking responsibility, and this rethinking complements a political refusal of the more exclusionary dimensions of official history. The popular history of the anni di piombo reveals fewer steps taken by institutions to accept their own responsibilities for the conflict, and is resented by ex-militants because of this. Maurice Bignami discussed how he risked his life during the rethinking process while the state was unable to accept its own responsibilities, and how Prima Linea mocked it for this failing:
We deconstructed the idea of the armed fight and reconstructed it in a different way [...so] the Brigatisti tried to kill me in the jail. And after the ‟86, disassociation is not only from the armed fight – but is from Marxism. Some of us, after ‟86, started a theoretical revision of our ideology. [... In the disassociation document of Prima Linea] we quoted a piece by „Farlosci‟ [a pun on „fallacy‟] – a fake author we made up – to say „we are nothing, but you are less than us‟; because we could at least reflect on ourselves, which other political classes cannot. (Bignami 2010)
Subjectivities after Defeat and after ‘Not-Quite-Defeat’
The processes of re-integration, re-thinking and defeat shaped the subjectivities of Italian interviewees in ways that were not mirrored in the case of EOKA. These factors will now be examined, before the conclusion of the article. Undertaking the Italian case study left me familiar with two narrative responses to defeat – a rethinking which balanced an amended objective history with a refusal of more exclusionary popular narratives, and a less prominent rethinking which narrated the past solely around explaining the interviewee‟s own deviance. I was shocked to return to the 13
EOKA testimonies and to see far lees reflexivity on display. The post-conflict ramifications of „semivictory‟ or „not-quite-defeat‟ appear to have had very different consequences for ex-militant subjectivities. Instead of releasing some of the antagonistic, and in some cases extreme, views which accompanied conflict, those views still appeared within testimonies. For example, fifty years after the end of the insurgency Renos Kyriakides still displayed dramatic contempt for the „traitors‟ (suspected collaborators) who were executed by EOKA:
We didn‟t have any Cypriot who didn‟t accept EOKA, but some were traitors. A number of them were dealt with properly [...] we killed them as traitors. (Kyriakides 2009)
Such ferocious statements about traitors to the national struggle, in addition to derogatory comments about Turkish-Cypriots as causes of instability in Cyprus, were made within a homogenous narrative which has apparently been stable since the end of the EOKA insurgency. The absence of defeat (although interviewees sometimes interpreted their failure to achieve „enosis‟ as a defeat) seems to have resulted in little mediation of the more extreme views, as ex-militant subjectivities have largely remained stable. Ex-militants have not needed to alter or mediate their perspective as they have been regarded as heroes since the conflict. As a result, fanciful views with little resemblance to reality were occasionally heard in the interviews – for example, when asked to clarify his statement about British de-Hellenisation tactics in Cyprus, Andreas Angelopoulos (in a seeming non sequitur) stated that “EOKA was ready since 1453, and 1821” (Angelopoulos 2009). While this was perhaps a rhetorical statement, it requires a mental commitment to understanding Hellenic nationalism to have existed hundreds of years before a Greek state did. It also requires a primordialist understanding of ethnicity (cf. Ozkirimli 2000), such that „Greek blood‟ inspired the actions of Cypriots just as it did revolutionaries who shook off the Ottoman empire in 1821.
This was not an isolated incident. The EOKA interviews cohered around these narratives and perceptions, which showed little change from the organisation‟s mantra in the 1950s. Conversely, the anni di piombo interviews cohered around commitments to rethinking opinions which were held in the past.7 These narrative coherences can be linked to the different post-conflict contexts inhabited by EOKA and anni di piombo ex-militants. In contexts where participation in a particular insurgency is glorified, protagonists can continuously embody this subjectivity – there is little need to renarrativise
7
Although one interviewee, who asked to remain anonymous, appears to have „rethought‟ less than others have. While he accepted that the armed fight was no longer applicable, the interviewee refused to dissociate from it or to express any regret. He believed that the contextual applicability of armed struggle would return in the future, and that the anni di piombo legacy should be preserved as a heritage to those future generations („Maurizio‟ 2010).
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the past, although presumably some aspects of the EOKA struggle have been highlighted differently since the Turkish invasion of 1974. In contexts of defeat, where participation in militancy is viewed with hostility, it appears that protagonists experience a need to reintegrate into the discourse of their society.
This post-defeat need for change and „re-emergence‟ was poetically described by Nadia Mantovani, and I will quote her at length – because her words will communicate this more effectively than mine:
While in prison, I began a process of non-identification and departure/estrangement [allontanamento] from my organisation [...] I began a personal journey which involved a political assessment and some existential rethinking, a process that was very painful, lasted several years, and was made even more difficult by the fact that it was taking place in prison [...] I did not allow myself to become a part of [non-violent activism within the prison], due to my visceral refusal of any form of collectivism. [...] Inside of me there was no desire. So I locked myself up and floundered a lot, before managing to get myself out of this spiral of depression and negativity. I have been helped by some people [...] and probably also by the evolution of the times. When the dissociation law was passed, I was at the beginning of the re-emergence process... (Mantovani 2010)
Conclusion
This article has compared interview transcripts from two very different post-conflict contexts. It has found that interviewee‟s appeals to an objectively-understood past often come packaged within political denunciations of the present. Furthermore the subjectivities of ex-militants from the EOKA and anni di piombo conflicts seem to cohere around the experiences of „se mi-victory‟ and defeat. Perspectives on the past thus appear embedded within contemporary contexts; narratives were either constructed around a search for explanations of previous behaviour (viewed as interesting, or even deviant, from their contemporary private lives) or were unreflexive and sometimes dogmatic (as was witnessed in the „semi-victorious‟ EOKA interviews). These findings might have interesting
repercussions for the use of interviewing within studies of contentious politics. Not only do they inform methodological debates about the relationship of interviews to the („objective‟) past, but they could open Social Movement research to the narrative studies approach in order to embrace the intrinsic politicality of memory.
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The finding which I would most like to highlight, however, concerns the connection between ex-militant‟s worldviews and post-conflict contexts. While Social Movement studies of contentious politics can understand ideology as a functional tool used by organisations to explain and mediate isolation and to alleviate distress at violent conduct (Della Porta 1992b), the continuing adherence of EOKA interviewees to militant frames in times of peace points to a need for further research. If militant perceptions were inculcated by the clandestine organisations for functional reasons, how can we explain their continued presence fifty years after the EOKA insurgency ended?
The testimonies of anni di piombo and EOKA interviews do not reveal a post-conflict return to a comparatively apolitical stance, so the functional formulation of ideology in contentious politics research may need to be reconsidered. I will conclude by suggesting that rather than considering perceptions of the word as ideas, ideology or frames, it might be fruitful to engage with the literature on subjectivity – and how perception and knowledge are always socially and politically produced. This literature understands the Cartesian subject – who can use rational powers to deduce objective truth – as a fiction carried forth from the Enlightenment. Instead, it understands what we say, how we think and what we know to always be performances of discourses which precede us (cf. Bell 1999; Foucault 2001; Hall 1992). These types of approaches may be useful for examining how post-conflict subjectivities are produced – either where the possession of power and the ability to make popular memory result in the continuation of militant narratives, or where subjection after defeat results in reevaluation of worldview and fractures in subjectivity. This type of approach may also assist researchers to cope with the simultaneous politicality and objective deployment of „history‟ as a narrative through which parties govern the present and the past.
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'Do You Remember Revolution?', in Antonio Negri (ed), Diary of An Escape (2010) (Cambridge: Polity Press): 35-49. Centro Bull, Anna (2007) Italian Neofascism: The Strategy of Tension and the Politics of Nonreconciliation (Oxford: Berghahn). della Porta, Donatella (1992a) 'Political Socialisation in Left-Wing Underground Organizations: Biographies of Italian and German Militants', in Donatella della Porta (ed), Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organizations; International Social Movement Research, Volume 4 (London: JAI Press): 259-90. Della Porta, Donatella (1992b) 'Introduction: On Individual Motivations in Underground Political Organisations', in Donatella Della Porta (ed), Social Movements and Violence: Participation in Underground Organisations; International Social Movement Research, Volume 4 (London: JAI Press): 3-28. Della Porta, Donatella (1995) Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Della Porta, Donatella and Tarrow, Sidney (1986) 'Unwanted children: Political violence and the cycle of protest in Italy, 1966–1973', European Journal of Political Research 14/5-6: 607-32. Drake, Richard (1989) The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Indiana: Indiana University Press). Foucault, Michel (2001) The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Abingdon: Routledge). Glynn, Ruth (2009) 'Writing the Terrorist Self: The Unspeakable Alterity of Italy‟s Female Perpetrators', Feminist Review 92: 1-18. Grivas, George (1964) The Memoirs of General Grivas (London: Longmans). Hall, Stuart (1992) 'The Question of Cultural Identity', in Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (eds), Modernity and its Futures; Understanding Modern Societies, An Introduction, Book 4 (Cambridge: Polity Press): 273-326. Held, David (1980) Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press). Holland, Robert F. and Markides, Diana Weston (2006) The British and the Hellenes: Struggles for Mastery in the Eastern Mediterranean 1850-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Horgan, John (2004) 'The Case for Firsthand Research', in Andrew Silke (ed), Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements & Failures (Abingdon: Frank Cass): 30-56. Horkheimer, Max (2002) 'Traditional and Critical Theory', in, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum): 188-243. Jackson, Richard, Breen-Smyth, Marie and Gunning, Jeroen (eds) (2009) Critical Terrorism Studies: A Research Agenda (Abingdon: Routledge).
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Interviews
Cyprus Angelopoulos, Andreas (24/11/2009), Limassol. Batarias, Charalambos (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Christodoulidou, Ellie (25/11/2009), Limassol. Christodoulides, Marios (25/11/2009), Limassol. Efstathiou, Augoustis (20/11/2009), Nicosia. Gregoras, Gregoris Louca (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Karlettides, Sophoulis (25/11/2009), Limassol. Kassinis, Ioannis (26/11/2009), Limassol. Kyriakides, Renos (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Papares, Avgerinos (25/11/2009), Limassol. Sophocleous, Thassos (17/11/2009), Nicosia. Stephou, Spyros (19/11/2009), Nicosia. Stephou, Maria (19/11/2009), Nicosia. Spanos, Yannis (20/11/2009), Nicosia. Varravas, Eliana (26/11/2009), Limassol. Varravas, Christakis (26/11/2009), Limassol.
Italy Bignami, Maurice (21/07/2010), Rome. Cavallina, Arrigo (17/07/2010), Verona. Cotone, Anna (24/07/2010), Rome. D‟Elia, Sergio (22/07/2010), Rome. Mantovani, Nadia (16/07/2010), Bologna. „Maurizio‟ (22/07/2010), Rome. Nicolotti, Luca (15/07/2010), Turin. Ognibene, Roberto (16/07/2010), Bologna. Ronconi, Susanna (15/07/2010), Turin. Segio, Sergio (14/07/2010), Milan. Solimano, Marco (19/07/2010), Livorno. Zaccheo, Ettorina (14/07/2010), Milan.
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