"Nothing is Certain, other than Uncertainty Itself": Youth, Futures, and Waiting under Non-Recognition in Northern Cyprus

Based on ethnographic research with young adults born into the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus ('TRNC'), this thesis traces how entrenched state-level conditions of non-resolution and non-recognition shape their individual lives. Cyprus has been divided for over half a century, with the internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus in the south and the unrecognised TRNC in the north. This stalemate has given rise to conditions of waithood, liminality, and uncertainty on both national and personal scales. This thesis shows how young people are affected when these scales become intermeshed with one another, arguing that entrenched non-resolution and non-recognition shape the ways in which they understand the past, make sense of the present, and imagine potential futures.

Over thirteen months in 2023 and 2024, ethnographic interviews and fieldwork were conducted with a network of twenty middle-class Turkish Cypriots between twenty-three and twenty-nine years old as they worked to establish their adult lives in the UK, Cyprus, and other Mediterranean countries. The thesis demonstrates that youth view both themselves and the TRNC as waiting, which prompts emigration and/or speculation about the future of the Turkish Cypriot people. Through discussions of corruption, conscription, roads, and electricity, young people articulated their feelings about the impotence of the unrecognised state and its incompatibility with their imagined futures and cosmopolitan ambitions. The interplay between the uncertainty of youth and the uncertainty of non-recognition is shown to foreclose both personal and national futures, reconfiguring the relationship between young adults, the unrecognised state, and the island itself.