The Republic of Cyprus is often thought of as a tourist destination and hot spot for sun thirsty expats. Hidden from plain sight amongst holiday homes and blue waters, it may thus seem counterintuitive that Cyprus is home to a toxic ethno-nationalist political conflict that has mandated one of the longest running United Nations peace interventions to date. Still, life in Cyprus does not resemble a conflict zone. This beckon the conceptual debate of peace as more than the absence of war and raises questions of how peace is perceived by involved actors and subsequently, how it is influenced by subjective ideas. With negotiations stuck in a cycle of stalling and reassuming, the peace process is often described as the Cypriot deadlock. The cause of the deadlock is debated without consensus, but frequently boils down to disagreements over policies and issues of intercommunal mistrust. Looking to nuance these notions, this thesis aims to explain the deadlock ideationally by analysing ideas of peace as expressed by political elites and assess how they influence the peace process. The research presents a typological method for mapping ideational biases corresponding to meta-ideas of International relations theory. The central argument of this thesis is that the Cypriot peace process is deadlocked due to divergent ideational biases of political elites, rendering the rationales and strategies (the ideational underpinnings) behind the peace process ideationally unviable. This desktop study of Cyprus is based of primary data from the official websites of the Republic of Cyprus, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and the United Nations, published between January of 2019 and April of 2021.

Ideas matter. Thus, approaching peacebuilding efforts from an ideational perspective can contribute to a deeper understanding of their meanings and legacies. Traditionally, the liberal peace paradigm has been prevalent in peacebuilding, translating into programs, projects, actions, and agreements that model liberal norms, values, and practices. Among these sets of ideas, it is possible to identify beliefs about New Public Management (NPM), which affect how instruments like peace agreements are designed and codified. However, this relationship has not been thoroughly explored in the peacebuilding and public management literature, although both strive to achieve efficient and effective governance and peace. In response to this gap, this thesis examines, through text analysis, the degree to which the normative and bureaucratic legacies of NPM are present in the design of a comprehensive peace agreement. This required the selection of an empirical case that could deepen the understanding of what kind of public management NPM ideas are embedded and to what extent, hence the selection of the Colombian Peace Agreement, an example of the golden standard in comprehensive arrangements. The study systematically reviewed and codified the text of the agreement –578 provisions or stipulations– based on the presence and specificity of NPM-related doc-trines. The findings show the pervasiveness of bureaucratic legacies associated with strategic planning, performance audit of provisions, decentralisation, and the appointment of managers and high-level bodies to administer the implementation. However, ideas associated with financial control, competition and flexibilization of the public sector, were less relevant. The analysis also identified other ideas, which expand on the civilian input in the main bureaucratic doctrines. Thus, it provides a new insight to understanding peace in bureaucratic terms as the strategic expansion of institutional infrastructure with strong oversight mechanisms within peace agreements. This calls for a more careful review of the bureaucratic legacies and understandings present in peacebuilding efforts and how they could relate to other sets of ideas already reviewed in the literature, which could lead to further research shaping our understanding of peace through time and across contexts.