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The Cyprus Peace Talks: A Critical Appraisal

Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University, m.michael{at}latrobe.edu.au

Despite three decades of persistent efforts to bring about a negotiated settlement, the small island of Cyprus still remains physically and demographically divided. Failure of the 2004 Annan Plan has compounded the need for a thorough reassessment of the Cyprus peace process with a view to ascertaining the reasons for its collapse. Drawing on the findings of research that attributes the failure of earlier negotiations to the negative balance between impeding influences and facilitating factors, the author examines the manner and the extent to which the Annan initiative internalized the lessons learned from these past failures. Was the collapse of the Annan initiative best explained in terms of the shortcomings of the mediating strategy, or did it fail because of the continuing intractability of the conflict (i.e. the two sides remain too far apart on the fundamentals for any mediating strategy to work)? This article examines how the Annan strategy sought to change the imbalance between impeding and facilitating factors, asking, in particular, where it made headway, where did it not, and why. It goes on to characterize the overall impeding/facilitating balance in the post-Annan period and advances a number of propositions on how the imbalance may be shifted in a more positive direction.

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