Processing the Peace:An Interview with Teya Sepinuck

In this interview, Teya Sepinuck, the Artistic Director of Theatre of Witness reflects not only on her first two projects in Northern Ireland, but also vividly illustrates her way of working by evoking seminal moments in her previous practice. Although, she has resisted attempts to systematise the Theatre of Witness process, preferring to see it as a set of principles rather than a fixed methodology, these principles have given rise to clear guidelines that have come to govern the process through which she works. As the interview illustrates, Sepinuck, a Jewish Buddhist, has no hesitation in explaining her approach within the framework of a humanist ‘spirituality’ that explicitly deploys Judeo-Christian terminology. She invites discussion of each participant's ‘prayer-life’ and positions herself primarily as a listener rather than an interlocutor. The introduction to the interview contextualises Sepinuck's practice in relation to her previous work and other drama-based interventions in Northern Ireland. Concerns that the lack of critical distance between the tellers and their stories inhibits those who see it from freely engaging with it as they might with a fictionalised account, are also critiqued. In the interview, Sepinuck directly addresses the risk of the commodification of her work, explaining the safeguards in place to protect the participants, who have repeatedly asserted how beneficial they have found their involvement in the work to be. The sense of autonomy and empowerment that emerges from these responses represent a persuasive challenge to concerns that they are passive instruments of the Theatre of Witness process.

De-linkage Processes and Grassroots Movements in Transitional Justice

Transitional justice literature has highlighted a negative relationship between enforced disappearances and reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Little attention has been paid to how human rights issues can become stepping-stones to reconciliation. The article explains the transformation of the Cypriot Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) from an inoperative body into a successful humanitarian forum, paving the way for the pro-rapprochement bi-communal grassroots mobilization of the relatives of the missing. By juxtaposing the experience of Cyprus with other societies confronting similar problems, the article shows how the issue of the missing can become a driving force for reconciliation. The findings indicate that a policy delinking humanitarian exhumations from the prospect of a wider political settlement facilitates positive transformation in protracted human rights problems and opens up a window of opportunity to grassroots actors.

Protracted Peace processes: Policy (Un)learning and the Cyprus Debacle

The article examines why a comprehensive settlement to resolve the Cyprus problem has yet to be reached despite the existence of a positive incentive structure and the proactive involvement of regional and international organizations, including the European Union and the United Nations. To address this question, evidence from critical turning points in foreign policy decision-making in Turkey, Greece and the two communities in Cyprus is drawn on. The role of hegemonic political discourses is emphasized, and it is argued that the latter have prevented an accurate evaluation of incentives that could have set the stage for a constructive settlement. However, despite the political debacle in the Cypriot negotiations, success stories have emerged, such as the reactivation of the Committee for Missing Persons (CMP), a defunct body for almost 25 years, to become the most successful bi-communal project following Cyprus’s EU accession. Contradictory evidence in the Cypriot peace process is evaluated and policy lessons to be learned from the CMP ‘success story’ are identified.

K-Contagion: Sound, Space and Speed in Psy's 'Gangnam Style'

Park Jae-Sang’s (otherwise known as PSY) bewilderingly successful pop contagion ‘Gangnam Style’ needs no introduction. As of January 2013, it has become the most watched video in YouTube’s history and has garnered over 1.23 billion hits since. ‘Gangnam Style’ has also become a rapid global pop phenomenon with multiple parodic reproductions, imitations and adaptations; Rapper PSY himself has become an international name and styled as the ‘anti-hero’ of the glamour-driven K-pop scene. His fame has transcended the social sphere and permeated the political stratosphere with politicians such as Barrack Obama and David Cameron being among the many whom PSY has exchanged pleasantries with. Apart from breaking ground and creating social and media history in many ways, ‘Gangnam Style’ has even been purported by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to be a “force for world peace” – cultural barriers are demolished as the world dances. Underlying this sentiment is the video’s almost universal appeal that assumes a supracultural yet equally paradoxical translatability: Korea’s neoteric ‘K-Wave’ phenomenon is at once local yet global, and where the latter is predicated on the former quality. The paper’s concern is thus two-fold. It will consider the dromological aspects of this musical contagion as it exemplifies and performs quite literally Paul Virilio’s thesis that the modern condition is driven by speed yet arrested to a dictatorship of movement. While many theories have been put forward for this astounding pop peculiarity, this paper would also examine the intercultural currents that advocate such a global (pop) cultural response. Through an analysis of sonic qualities – digital techno-beat rhythms, synth-based musicality, cyclical lyrics, horse-galloping movements – and acoustic receptions, it will consider the simultaneous and dichotomous currents of glocalisation and globalisation as it relates to the ways in which sonic ‘hyper-links’ establish new concepts of global-cultural identities even as these seem to be interrogated in the borderless worlds of hyper-mediatised realities and cultural technologies.