This platform intends to collate and visualise various elements of the landscape of control that have (trans)formed the maritime area around Cyprus into a violent borderscape. Through an interactive map, embedded summaries, collaborative posts and timelines, we have attempted to trace intersecting elements at sea that enforce the Cypriot-European border. These elements include legal delineations, surveillance technologies, political decisions, funding schemes, violent practices towards people on the move, and more. By assembling this network we recognise violence beyond individual incidents, rendering visible its systematic and deliberate construction through borders and enabling the attribution of responsibility beyond causality.
We encourage you to take time to engage with this platform and to activate it: to read the summaries of the incidents of violence, watch the timelines of selected cases understanding that every incident affects many lives, and read the analyses of the elements included in the maps to understand the political structures that both stem from and contribute to this violence.
We acknowledge that this platform is incomplete. The borderscape encompasses injustices and actors beyond what we have assembled. At the same time, information on the incidents we included in the
interactive map was often scarce or conflicting, yet we chose to include every incident for which we found details, believing that each one, regardless of the amount of available information, was important to share. We have made the varying information density as transparent as possible. For more details on how we processed and evaluated the information, please refer to
our methodology.
As such, this platform is not intended as legal evidence, and the locations depicted on the map are for visualisation purposes only. It is intended as a tool to understand structural violence and ignite collective awareness of injustice, mourn the tragic deaths and disappearances, and fight in solidarity with the resistance of people on the move against all forms of border violence.