Diasporic FuturesTemporality and Hope in the Transnational Politics of London Cypriots

Diasporic Futures is a thoughtful study in the anthropology of hope, tracing and questioning its analytic horizons in the context of frozen conflict. Its remarkable ethnographic richness springs from the various locations in which diaspora happens: the erstwhile colonial centre, the questionable homeland, community centres, political performances, cyberspace and multifarious borders. A needed text for bleak times.

‘A fascinating and well-grounded critique of the concept of hybridity, which has become popular in diaspora studies. The book focuses on a less studied aspect of Cypriot diaspora politics and the analyses of intergenerational tensions and differences regarding the history and politics of Cyprus. The exploration of the role of ICT in peacebuilding in Cyprus is particularly interesting.’

It is an excellent and original addition to literature on the politics and partition of Cyprus, bringing fresh data and perspective and without shying away from the complexities of diasporic political identity.

Diasporic Futures offers an impressive ethnographic account of how diaspora politics take shape across generations, institutions, digital networks and journeys “home”, particularly at moments when “surges of hope” “make alternative futures appear possible”. [...It] shifts attention from conflict and nationalism to the contested meanings of peace politics in diaspora. One of its major strengths is that it does not romanticise peace, but instead shows the contradictions, compromises and contestations involved in peace struggles. [...] By treating hope as an ethnographic object of analysis rather than an abstract ideal, Chatzipanagiotidou offers a rigorous account of how futures are lived in the present, and how diasporas are made and unmade through time.

Diasporic Futures offers a compelling defense of temporality in the analysis of diasporic and transnational political formations. Very much writing from the present, Chatzipanagiotidou argues that diasporic time does not move linearly. Rather, it is aggregated and reorganized at specific historical junctures and places and animated by competing temporal orientations, the future being one so far widely overlooked in the diaspora literature. Thoroughly well-written, the resulting book is an authoritative intervention in diaspora studies.

The book's empirical depth, reflective of the researcher's longstanding presence in the field, shines through its fine- grained ethnography of London's Cypriot spaces, tracing how geopolitical shifts in Cyprus reverberated through everyday urban life. Besides this careful and detailed analysis of Cypriot diaspora politics, a standout conceptual and empirical contribution comes in the book's illuminating digital ethnography of early social media Mobilization. For this reason, Diasporic Futures reads like a call to champion deep, multi- sited, long- term ethnography in diaspora studies, all the while recognizing and grappling with the reality of our digital age.