Introduction

While ethnic conflict has many dimensions, one of the first to strike the observer is the territorial one. Marching rituals in Northern Ireland, for instance, are designed frequently to express symbolic control over territory, and the very creation of Belfast’s ‘peace line’ represents an effort to give concrete geographical shape to a profound interethnic division. The contours of the ethnic mosaic of Cyprus became increasingly clearly defined in the 1960s, and in 1974 the ethnic map of the country was radically reformed, as the long-established bicommunal patchwork yielded to a partitioned country, a ‘green line’ extending through Nicosia and the rest of the island separating the Turkish North from the Greek South. In a similar development, intercommunal conflict in Lebanon was eventually transformed into competition over territory, with another ‘green line’ stretching through Beirut and partitioning it into western (Muslim) and eastern (Christian) sectors. This pattern is commonly to be found elsewhere, with Kashmir and Israel/Palestine offering vivid contemporary examples.