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Kovras

Iosif Kovras

Iosif Kovras, PhD Student, (Ptychio Panteion University Athens, MScEcon Aberystwyth)
ikovras01@qub.ac.uk

Thesis

My research focuses on the recent exhumations of mass graves in Spain and Cyprus containing the remains of the victims of the Spanish Civil War and the victims of the two waves of violence in Cyprus (1963-64 and 1974). The central puzzle that my thesis addresses is why both Cypriot communities and the Spanish society, until recently, did not manage to comprehensively address the issue of ‘missing persons’ and more generally they did not put forward a process of truth recovery.
Contrary to the experience of other countries with similar memories of clandestine violence and ‘missing persons’ (e.g. Argentina, Guatemala and Chile), where the mobilization of the civil society towards recovering the truth (bodies of the victims) was immediate and pivotal, the societies in Cyprus and Spain remained silent or selectively vocal for a remarkably long period.
Consequently my thesis aspires to respond to these questions: why these processes remained dormant for so long? Which conditions can explain the recent demand for truth-recovery and the subsequent emergence of the ‘politics of exhumations’? What theoretical implications arise in relation to the literature of transitional justice?

I am focusing primarily on the role of the victims’ associations - and more generally on the role of the civil society - in promoting truth recovery in post-conflict settings, through the lenses of contentious politics literature. The role of other crucial actors in the promotion of truth recovery, such as international institutions, the media and the elites, is also examined.

Areas of Research

Transitional Justice and Reconciliation; Truth Recovery; Politics of Memory; Human Rights; Nationalism, Ethnicity and Identity; International political theory; Normative IR Theory.

Supervisors
, Neophytos Loizides.