New Data on Old Conflicts: Internal and External Legitimacy of Political Violence in the Case of the Greek Cypriot Organization EOKA (1955-1959)

This paper is intended for the panel on "Reinterpreting Political Violence in History." This paper conceptualizes the evolution of the legitimacy of political violence. Utilizing a theoretical framework that operationalizes the use of social norms and social networks in optimizing recruitment by organizations of political violence, the paper deconstructs the legitimation process into two phases: the nascent stage where an initial cadre creates a foundation of legitimizing aims and a subsequent stage where this foundation is instrumental to the recruitment strategies and tactics of the organization. This theoretical framework is tested through an application to the case study of EOKA, the Greek Cypriot insurgent organization that engaged in an armed struggle against British colonial forces with the aim to unite Cyprus with Greece in the 1950s (1955-1959) and resulted in the independence of Cyprus in 1960. The paper presents a new interpretation of this historical violent conflict in a number of ways. The evidence from the case study is drawn from a new database based on interviews conducted with ranked officers and recruiters of the organization and a survey questionnaire of the members of the organization. This paper focuses on the data collected through interviews to examine two different research questions: 1) How did conflict participants conceptualize both the external and the internal legitimacy of the organization within the chronology of the organization’s action and evolution? By external legitimacy, we mean the relationship between the organization and its sociopolitical environment as that is expressed through an analysis of its relations to the broader social network and its dominant social norms. By internal legitimacy, we mean the dominant discursive practices and narratives of the organization. Answering this question presents broader conceptual arguments for the temporal adaptation of organizations of political violence to changes in sociopolitical variables. 2) How does the resulting data analysis differ from the broader historical discourse on the conflict? Answering this question also reveals patterns in the shaping of such discourses and the ways in which individual actions and experiences converge or diverge from collective narratives and their reinforcing discursive practices.