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Energy Security and the Cyprus Question: “Securitization” of Energy in the Eastern Mediterranean

In February 2014, Nikos Anastasiades, the President of the Republic of Cyprus and Dervis Eroglu, the Turkish-Cypriot leader, signed a Joint Declaration that established certain “ground-rules” upon which the then stalled peace talks -aiming at the island’s reunification-could be revived. The main stimulant prompting this evolution was the discovery of new energy sources in the Eastern Mediterranean, and especially offshore the RoC. In October 2014, Turkish navigational warning notified mariners that Turkey would soon perform its seismic surveys in sea areas that encroach on Cyprus’s EEZ, raising concerns on the escalation of the intractable and protracted Cyprus conflict. Aim of this research project is to provide readers with an insight on how the flow between energy and power politics is played out in the Eastern Mediterranean. Suggesting that the existing tensions extend beyond the struggle over the existing material energy assets in the seabed of the Levant Basin, the project casts light upon the notion of energy security by setting forth the indicators it is composed of. While scrutinizing the statements of the leaders on these events and seeking to highlight the security discourses they are coming up with, the project resorts to discourse analysis.


Introduction
In February 2014, Nikos Anastasiades, the President of the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) and Dervis Eroglu, the Turkish-Cypriot leader, signed a Joint Declaration establishing certain "ground-rules" upon which the then stalled peace talks -aiming at the island's reunificationcould be revived. This evolution was arguably prompted by the discovery of new energy sources in the Eastern Mediterranean, and especially offshore the RoC. Gas had initially been portrayed as a potential catalyst for a restart of the long-standing peace process, and possibly for its successful conclusion. Nevertheless, a couple of months later, it seemed that these discoveries had worked against these aspirations and added chill to the Cyprus conflict. In October 2014, a Turkish navigational warning notified mariners that Turkey would soon perform its seismic surveys in sea areas that encroach on Cyprus's EEZ, raising concerns on the escalation of the existing protracted conflict. Anastasiades withdrew from the negotiations, attributing his decision to these activities.
If someone had to summarize the Cyprus conflict in a few words, he would quote the aphorism of the deceased former President of the RoC, Glafkos Clerides': "What satisfies their fears is what increases our fears, and so we have this paradoxical situation that unless we can find a way in which the fears of both communities are put at rest, it would be extremely difficult to find a solution to the Cyprus problem" (Coughlan 1991: 92). This phrase seems to capture the very essence of the diachronic security dilemma on the island.
Reading into thorough analyses, embedded in the rich literature of the Cyprus studies, we have figured out that the roots of the Cyprus conflict, and other intractable conflicts alike, are mapped more into intangible sociological, cultural, religious and psychological factors rather than scarce resources. These intangible factors have resulted in a sense of mutual suspicion that exerts a significant influence in the tensions unfolding in the present.
The challenge of the current thesis is to comprehend how the legacies, based in the past, come into play in the course of the current developments. The central research objective of this project is to provide readers with an explanatory account on how the interplay between energy and power politics operates. We seek to sketch out a comprehensive framework for energy security in the Eastern Mediterranean, while bringing the intractable Cyprus conflict to the forefront.
In periods of such distress, grassroots expect their political leaders to step up and communicate a narrative explaining what is at stake, who is the threat and why. In other words, the leaders are expected to establish the proper "security discourses". The research question that this article intends to address is: what are the indicators that formulate these "security discourses"? This question gains currency if we consider that the crisis episodes extend beyond the material resources in the seabed of the Levant Basin. They occur among entities whose relations have been characterized by historically mutual antagonism. In the light of the intractable nature of the Cyprus conflict, we want to learn which factors led the assigned political leaders of the contending parties to "securitize" the recent gas discoveries in the region the way they did. To this end, the current study places the concept of energy security under critical scrutiny by dissecting how the political leaders manipulate it.
To sufficiently tackle this question, certain steps seem necessary. The first part focuses on the very notion of security. Following the constructivist thought, we claim that its formation unfolds in various contexts and refers to various referent objects. The procedure that underscores the formation of its subjective character is "securitization", meaning the discursive construction of threat (Buzan et al 1998). Using the recent tensions as our case study, the second part explains how securitization discourses unfold within that time frame.
To this effect, it sheds light to the related statements and speeches, delivered by the political leaders of the disputants. Blame-games, pointing fingers and assigning the label of security threat to one another are expected to litter the speeches and interviews during these times. The next step is to proceed with the definition of energy security. For the sake of this article we define it as the embodiment of two indicators that relate to its content and context dependent character respectively: availability and accessibility. Concerning the first, particular attention is paid to the estimations on the amount of the recent natural gas reserves that have been discovered around the island. The accessibility pillar, largely pertaining to the very notion of energy security, contains the geopolitical relations among the actors involved or potentially involved in exploiting these discoveries. Geopolitical relations as a notion, though, are too broad and vague. Therefore, we squeeze them into two contexts: legal and historical. As to the first, we try to identify how the disputants adopted international law to give legitimacy to their course of action, with particular reference to certain provisions of UNCLOS. As to the second, the paper embarks upon 8 the historical journey that explains the diachronically incompatible objectives of the disputants.
Theoretical Framework: understanding energy security in the constructivist thought The notion of security in the realist thought Edward Azar (1986: 28), a pioneer in the field of conflict studies, describes "denial of security needs" as an important variable in the genesis and the crystallization of protracted conflicts. The heartbreaking plight, in which the divided island of Cyprus finds itself today, is the manifestation of a dilemma which human societies have had to grapple with since the dawn of history: the security dilemma, coined by Herz (1950: 157). Security dilemma describes a constellation wherein an actor, seeking to increase his security, triggers the unintended effect of decreasing the security of the other. Groups, being "trapped" in such a predicament, are worried about their security "from being attacked, subjected, dominated or annihilated by other groups or individuals." (ibid) Seeking to attain security from such an attack, they are driven to acquire more and more power aiming to alleviate the impact of the others' power. This in turn, renders them more insecure and urges them to get prepared for armed conflicts or even for wars.
The quest for security -whether economic or military-raises a sense of urgency to politics and, thus, it constitutes one of the enduring sources of passion in policy controversies (Stone 2002: 88). Nonetheless, security is not devoid of meaning. It may be perceived for instance, as the preservation of a group's or a nation's core values. Such a broad and vague definition of security, though, does not sufficiently throw light on the identity of the groups, on the content of their core values and on where threats to these values come from (McDonald 2008: 61). The idea that security can be reduced to objective and countable needs is politically problematic. As Wolfers (1952: 491-92;) first postulated: states vary widely in the value they place on security while some of them may be so dissatisfied with the status quo that they are more interested in acquiring new values than in securing the values they already have. On account of these theoretical loopholes, we infer that although the realist thought has provided us with an intellectual insight into the overpowering effect of security in the bilateral relations, this concept is not as straightforward as it appears in their analyses. Therefore, we might lose a great deal when we squeeze the actor's behavior 9 into the universalist and abstract categories that the realist thought provides (Jervis 1988: 344).

The contribution of constructivism and the concept of securitization
This is where the school of constructivism steps in. For constructivists, answers to these questions are different depending on the context and evolve through social interaction between the disputants. Specifically, constructivists treat security as a context-specific social construction. Instead of developing abstract definitions of security, constructivists and especially the Copenhagen School (CS), have focused on how security itself is given meaning through the inter-subjective processes that unfold between the disputants in geographically and historically specified contexts.
What animates the CS is the concept of 'securitization' that refers to the discursive construction of threat (Buzan et al 1998). More concretely, securitization may be identified as a process in which an actor assigns the label of an existential threat to a particular issue, dynamic or actor. The invocation of security opens the window for the political leader to mobilize special powers in order to handle existential threats (ibid: 21).Therefore, the meaning of security is not located in a philosophical and abstract universe, but lies in its very usage by the authorized political leaders.
The way to study securitization is to study discourse constellations. In security discourse, a topic is dramatized and presented by the political leaders as a topic of supreme priority.
Hence, by framing an issue as security, a political leader claims a need for and a right to treat it even by extraordinary means.
Despite its subjective character, in order to adroitly direct the audience's attention towards an event-construed as dangerous, the words of the leader need to resonate with the framework within which his reactions are collocated. This means, that the security statements of a political leader, aiming to win an audience must be associated with an existing external reality, for instance an evidently aggressive course of action performed by the opponent (Balzaq 2005: 182). This action must be perceived by the public as an action that violates the sovereignty and/or the resources of the state entity.

General observations on energy security
A field that could easily become subject to "securitization" is energy. The drive to control oil and natural resources is frequently said to be a cause of wars between states and within states. Energy trends and international politics are innately interconnected and energy security is an integral part of the foreign and national security policies of states. A country's ability to access energy supplies and the ways in which it uses energy determine the state of its national security (Shaffer 2009). Rooted in the industrialization of the society, the very notion of energy security has traditionally been identified as the "safety and source diversification of energy fuels and services" (Sovacool& Brown 2009: 7).
Nevertheless, the meaning of energy fuels and services has been contingent upon content perspective. For most of the 20 th century, public security concerns were almost exclusively concentrated on oil and coal supply. World War I and World War II had starkly highlighted the prominence of oil and coal in high politics (Yergin 2009: 773). Some decades later, these concerns had reached their peak during the 1970s when Western society, almost in its entirety, struggled to overcome the economically disastrous implications of the 1973-74 and 1979-80 oil crises 1 . The shortages and spiking prices that resulted from the embargoes functioned as a critical juncture for many European countries to change their then dominant path of energy dependence by diversifying their resources away from Middle East oil.

Natural gas at the forefront
These oil crises expanded the nation-state laden and traditional concept of energy security to cover energy sources other than oil. The reason is that new natural gas discoveries and rising demand have shifted gas from a cluster of regional markets into a global marketplace (Gloystein 21.11.2012). Natural gas is currently the third most important energy source, after oil and coal, and is rapidly gaining prominence in global energy markets. Attributed to its relatively clean and efficient combustion, natural gas is emerging as the fuel of choice for a wide array of uses, like the generation of electric power (Barnes J. et al 2006: 1).
As a traded good, natural gas is supplied with permanent infrastructure and long-term supply arrangements, like pipelines and LNG 2 infrastructures. These infrastructures are extremely costly to build and require long-run horizons as well as a predictable geopolitical and economic context for investors to "sink their capital and knowledge" (Barnes et al 2006: 3). The required long-term supply relationships and the permanent infrastructure offer a window of much greater opportunity for (geo)politics to come into play (Shaffer 2013: 114-115). Due to the state-regulated sphere, within which the gas market is operating (ibid.), governments are urged to play a larger role in the natural gas trade. Infrastructure projects link states and mirror the geopolitical relations among them. Thus, states in choosing routes to export their commodities and import their energy supplies naturally consider and promote their political ramifications of various route options (ibid.).
Decisions on natural gas export projects are especially likely to be affected by political considerations because they can be quite risky otherwise (Shaffer 2009: 2).

Operationalizing "securitization" of natural gas in the Cyprus conflict
We observed above that the concept of energy security is not as straightforward as it might appear in various analyses. How it is conveyed is context dependent and springs from patterns of the anarchic international politics (Ciuta 2010: 130). What begs the question is how we narrow down the concept of energy security and comprehend it in the imbroglio of the Cypriot realities? Making use of the definitions of APERC (2007) and Kruyt et al (2009Kruyt et al ( : 2168, this article treats the concept of energy security as the embodiment of two main indicators, two A's: a. the availability of gas reserves in the region, which, in general, pertains to the classical notion of geological or physical availability of hydrocarbon resources in the region 3 . The indicator here is the exploration context. By exploration context, we mean here the amount of gas reserves, reported, estimated and/or discovered offshore the RoC. b. the accessibility that signifies the political and economic "barriers" to ensure that energy supplies remain accessible (APERC 2007: 19). Energy security largely pertains to this indicator, since a depletion of energy reserves has seen countries struggle to maintain 2 Liquefied Natural Gas 3 It should be stressed that large uncertainties surround the amounts of hydrocarbon resources and their extraction potential. Few studies provide estimates of fossil fuel resources and the most significant one is that of the US Geological Survey. steady and accessible energy services. Factors that influence accessibility include the relations between the surrounding countries, especially when they are disputing over the "availability" of the resources. In order to understand how this indicator works in the current study, light will be cast upon the: i. Legal context: we sketch out here the application of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in the Eastern Mediterranean, with special reference to the delimitation of the Exclusive Economic Zone between the Republic of Cyprus and Turkey.
Setting out the legal framework is instrumental in comprehending the legal positions and constraints within which the "securitization discourses" of the disputants evolve.
ii. Historical context: the paper will lay out the historical background that has shaped the relations between the contending parties. The challenge here is to identify and document if and how the lexicon of the protracted Cyprus conflict encourages modulations and transpositions in the meanings that the authorized political leaders assign to energy security.

Methodology and Data: securitization of natural gas discoveries through the statements of the political leaders Data
To identify the securitization of the gas discoveries around the island, the current paper resorts, first of all, to the statements that the leaders in Cyprus delivered during the period of the tensions. It was in October 2014 when the President of RoC decided to pull out of the re-unification negotiations, after the Turkish seismic vessel Barbaros illegally entered RoC's EEZ. Security issues, particularly energy security issues came to the spotlight. It is interesting to observe how the political leaders articulated their security concerns vis-à-vis each other through the statements delivered at that time (Table 1).
Why do we pay attention to these figures? Irrespective of whether these leaders activate their constituencies, they engage in opinion-making behavior. As Rosenau (1963: 6) underlines, national opinion-makers are considered to be those members of every society who occupy positions which enable them to transmit, with some regularity, opinions about national security issues to their constituencies and to point to what is at stake.
Why do we explicitly concentrate on the above-mentioned periods? People experience tensions, like the ones in October 2014, as episodes of threat and uncertainty. They face them as a grave predicament requiring urgent action (Rosenthal et al 2001). It is a natural inclination in such distress to look to their political leaders to step up and communicate a message or a narrative that explains what is at stake, who is the threat and why. The perceptive quality of these tensions is what we want to bring into scrutiny during these kinds of periods by documenting the phraseology that the leaders adopt. Within this timeframe of tensions we seek to identify and highlight "existential language as an indicator of securitization through the suggestion of a sense of urgency and prioritization" (Fischhendler& Nathan 2014: 155).

Discourse analysis
By examining the "securitization" procedure or otherwise the "discursive construction of threat", this project will resort to discourse analysis in order to generate the categories of meaning (George 1994: 29) by which energy security in the Eastern Mediterranean can be understood and explained. Discourses refer to communication practices that systematically construct our knowledge of reality. A discourse "embodies a shared set of capabilities which enable the assemblage of words, phrases and sentences into meaningful texts intelligible to the readers" (Dryzek 1988: 710). By critically reflecting upon these statements, we seek to map out what "truths" on energy security issues these documents establish.
We document expressions centered on blame games, threats and referent object (the gas discoveries). The specific words and phrases will explain how and why the one side portrays the other as a danger to its security. We aspire to understand how securitization unfolds within these speeches, and what historical as well as legal dynamics underlie the leaders' energy security discourses. More particularly we highlight two variables within specific sentences of the statements. The first, the dependent one, is composed of key words and phrases that unveil the articulations of the leaders' energy security concerns (who is the threat, what is at stake). The second, the independent one, is prognosticative of the legalistic argumentation and consists of references to the experiences of the past. The independent variable, which refers to the legal and historical context of the accessibility pillar, will be analyzed in the following sections. His very words were that Turkish actions "strike a heavy blow against the negotiations for the settlement of the Cyprus problem". He claimed that the Turkish encroachment on the island's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) has been articulated as a determinant factor, which had brought the negotiations into collapse. Pointing a finger to the Turkish side, he stated that their activities "destroy the efforts of creating a good and positive environment and actually derail the whole negotiating process". "The increasingly aggressive nature of Turkey's actions in areas in the eastern Mediterranean under the jurisdiction of the Republic of Cyprus" was one of the key phrases in his statement. He added that "negotiating under constant threat and blackmail that undermine all efforts to create the good environment necessary for a successful outcome of the negotiations for the settlement of the Cyprus problem is not just counterproductive. "It also has a negative effect on public opinion," he noted in the letter.

The securitization discourses by the President of the
In order to further highlight the portrayal of Turkish actions as a threat, he used the adjective "provocative" characterizing "Turkey's decision to reserve areas, including parts of Cyprus EEZ for seismic surveys". He adopted the same adjective to claim that these Turkish activities "had been the culmination of a continued provocative policy of disputing and interfering with the sovereign rights of the Republic of Cyprus in its exclusive economic zone". In this context he described that "this provocative policy included, apart from continued verbal threats and rhetoric, the harassment of vessels performing lawful activities authorized by the government of the Republic of Cyprus, by Turkish warships and military aircraft, and unlawful seismic surveys within the western exclusive economic zone of Cyprus by Turkish vessels".
While the security discourses have been set forth above (the dependent variable), special attention will be paid to the last words of the last sentence. In this sentence, we realize how the legal pillar of energy security, one aspect of the independent variable comes into play amid the securitization procedure. Additionally, he stressed that Cyprus' EEZ was Eroglu (that will be underlined later). In this statement, the blame is not solely laid on Turkey, as before, but also on the Turkish-Cypriots. While pointing a finger, he questioned whether the Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot actions served any pre-electoral objectives 4 or any other expediency. He added that the Turkish activities, which blatantly violated the sovereign rights of the RoC (legal pillar as the independent variable), underrated any potential benefits that the country would gain from a solution of the Cyprus question and torpedoed the efforts to find a just, viable and functional solution for the benefit of all the Cypriot people.
Two days later, 5 Anastasiades expressed his hope that the Turkish Cypriot community and Turkey would redress "the recent provocations and undertake the necessary practical and substantial steps towards this end". Furthermore, he acknowledged "that although the Cyprus problem has been decisively shaped by a number of external factors, we, the Cypriots, have also committed mistakes", adding that "we must have the courage to admit that we have failed to adequately address the challenges posed by the growing tensions that infiltrated the two communities and resulted in a deterioration of inter-communal bonding".
The last statement of Anastasiades deviates content-wise (not significantly though) from the previous ones. He used the term "Cypriot" to connote common characteristics that the Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriots share while potentially portraying Turkey as an "external factor" 6 . In any case, the reference to the history that connects and divides the grassroots constituencies on the island reflects a statement, wherein history, as an independent variable, comes into play in the securitization procedure.
The securitization discourses by the Turkish Cypriot leader: "Greek Cypriots are responsible for the current impasse" to impose their will on the Turkish Cypriots." He said "in the negotiations with south Cyprus we have come to an agreement, according to which the natural resources and petrol in the seas will belong mutually to the Turkish Cypriots and the Greek Cypriots, that the usage of these will be left to the authority of a federal state and that the agreements regarding the management will pass through the parliament with a qualified majority vote, which means that the Turkish side will have a right" (KP Daily News 14.10.2014). He characterized "the south Cyprus' one sided sovereignty claims as a signal of their insincerity. Stressing the legal pillar of the energy security discourses, he claimed that, in alignment with the principles of the Sea Laws, "in half closed seas such as the Eastern Mediterranean, the boundaries of the sea areas can only be determined when the bordering states agree upon the delimitation of the sea management areas". He evoked again the legal pillar by saying that, "south Cyprus does not have such an agreement with Turkey or with the Turkish Cypriots". Due to this lack of agreement the Greek Cypriot cannot raise any claims with respect to the "illegality" of the Turkish-Turkish Cypriot agreements. He also underlined that these agreements have emerged as an outcome of Greek Cypriots' reluctance to come to terms either with them or Turkey. On these grounds he justified his decision to pass the management of the natural resources on to Turkey Petrol Anon Partnership (ibid).

Explaining the pillars of "energy security" in the Cyprus QuestionThe
previous part set forth the energy "securitization discourses" of the disputants. It depicted how the leaders have articulated the recent gas discoveries as a security issue, how they portrayed the threats and stressed what is at stake. This part concentrates on these indicators that have potentially contributed to these modulations of energy security. As stressed above, these indicators are to be found in the notion of energy security as the embodiment of the two pillars: availability and accessibility. Due to the content and context dependent character of energy security, we need to know how these indicators are operationalized in the context of the Cypriot realities.

The legal context as an accessibility pillar of energy security
The aim of this section is to explain how the legal framework of availability indicator comes into play within the securitization procedure of the natural gas reserves. We outline the "official rules of the game" by which the state-protagonists in the current tensions are supposed to abide, in order to grasp an understanding of the legal context within which the "security discourses" are unfolding.
There is a well-developed body of international law governing maritime boundaries and  Greek Cypriots, in alignment with the opinion held by the international community, accept that the management of the island's natural resources should be for the benefit of all the original residents of the island.
To understand the second reason why Turkey and Turkish Cypriots hold this negative standing vis-à-vis the above mentioned agreements, one must go back to the year 1982.
Although Turkey participated in the UNCLOS negotiations, Turkey has not signed either ratified UNCLOS, primarily because of its dispute with Greece over maritime boundaries it has unilaterally raised in the Aegean Sea. Turkey is not a party to UNCLOS. The Turkish perspective is that certain provisions of UNCLOS 10 , with special reference to Articles 3, 33, and 121 of the Treaty, puts vital interests of Turkey in the Aegean into jeopardy.
Utilizing the customary character of the international sea law, Turkey applies a territorial sea law that in general, delineates the breadth of its territorial sea at 6 NM (Gurel et al 2013: 31). Nevertheless, this delimitation is conditioned on a proviso authorization by the Council of Ministers (CoM) 'to establish the breadth of the territorial sea, in certain seas, up to a limit exceeding six nautical miles, under reservation to take into account all special 10 Which do not fall under the scope of the current project despite their relative importance circumstances and relevant situations therein, and in conformity with the equity principle' 11 (ibid.). For the time being, Turkey applies a 6 NM limit to the territorial sea in the Aegean Sea while the limit in the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea is 12 NM, as provisioned in a CoM decree (ibid) 12 . Turkey has no continental shelf-or EEZ-related legislation. A CoM decree established the Turkish EEZ in the Black Sea at 200 NM (ibid.) but no EEZ proclamation exists.
As a reaction to the commencement of exploratory drilling authorized by the RoC government off the island's southern coast, and aiming at restoring the "balance of powers" in the region, on 21 September 2011 the Turkish Cypriots signed a continental shelf delimitation agreement with Turkey. The contributing parts drew a boundary line between the northern coast of Cyprus and the southern coast of Turkey in the Mediterranean seas. In doing so, Turkish Cypriots issued licenses to TPAO 13 to conduct three-dimensional seismic research along with onshore and offshore drilling around maritime borders between the northern part of the island and Turkey.

The historical context as an accessibility pillar of energy security
This sub-part addresses the second parameter of the accessibility pillar, the historical context. Rather than treating history as a dead subject, irrelevant of the current energy tensions, we should conceive it as a living process, as a continuous path dependence, that links developments throughout decades and encourages us to concentrate on such linkages and their influence in the securitization procedure of the current events.

Geography
Throughout recorded time, the political experience in the island has reflected the interlocking impact of two utterly basic geographic factors: size and location (James 2002:3). The total area of the island is 9.251 square kilometers, 10 square kilometers of and other ethnic or religious groups (mainly Maronites, Latin Catholics, Armenians and the non-officially recognized Gypsies and others) the remaining 5%.
Concerning the second factor, Cyprus possesses a central position in global politics since it is located at the juncture of Eurasia with Africa. Turkey is the closest neighbor at 50 miles north of the island, while Syria and Lebanon are approximately 70 miles to its eastern side.
Other neighboring territories include Egypt in the south (240 miles) and Israel to the southeast (124 miles). In the westward direction, the nearest Greek Dodecanesian island, Castellorizo is 170 miles away while its distance from the Greek mainland is close to 500 miles. The island's main natural resources (besides hydrocarbons) are copper, pyrites, asbestos, gypsum, timber, salt, marble and clay earth pigment (CIA World Factbook).

From antiquity to the British administration
This place has witnessed the invasion, the establishment and the interaction of all the ancient civilizations of pre-history and proto-history projecting it into a "crossroad of  Talat (2008)(2009)(2010) and Eroglu (2010Eroglu ( -2012 led to the drafting of common positions or joint declarations but no evident progress was to be noted.
In February 2014, Nikos Anastasiades, the President of the Republic of Cyprus and Dervis Eroglu, the Turkish-Cypriot leader, signed a Joint Declaration that laid out certain "ground-rules" upon which the then stalled peace talks -aiming at the island's reunificationcould be revived. The perspective to cooperate on the exploitation of the natural gas reserves (analyzed below), detected off the southern side of the island was considered by the international community (UN, EU) as a carrot or "window of opportunity" to reach a settlement. However, as shown below, these reserves added extra chill to the Cypriot question.

Conclusions: Policy paradigm as an alternative route to examine security discourses
The aim of this research was to prove how the accessibility pillars, the historical and legal contexts, lend their perennial attributes to the securitization discourses of the leaders. By briefly presenting the energy discourses performed by the leaders and by analytically delineating the pillars upon which energy security is built, the first assumption of this paper is that the historical vocabulary of the Cyprus conflict has not captured the lexicon of the current tensions as it was expected to since the references to history were not as frequent as anticipated. The second assumption was that the leaders did recall provisions of UNCLOS to justify the validity of their securitization discourses.
In order to assert the impact of history on these discourses, a future research should broaden the amount of data. This means that another project could use more statements evidential of portraying the links between history and securitization, as the framing of the current tensions. The statements of the Turkish authorities, which have played an active role in the actual tensions, should be also included, although in rhetorical terms, the "securitization" discourses do not appear that often in the radar.
Besides this, an alternative theory could have been put in place in order to highlight the significance of history in the formulation of these discourses. By theorizing that much of these discourses are conducive to the formation of the leaders' preferences, we have to cast light upon the driving forces that form them.
There is no doubt that the way in which the political leaders of nation-states view each other, as well as the nature of the conflict, is of fundamental importance in determining the discourses they resort to. According to George (1969), a political actor perceives and simplifies the reality through the prism of his own "cognitive map" of politics. This includes the belief system that has been referred to in the past and is called "operational code". Following this line, Weir and Skocpol (1985) assert that the ideals, which leaders pursue at any moment in time, are shaped by "policy legacies" or "meaningful reactions to previous policies" and/or crises. Attributed to the lessons they draw from these experiences, they develop a "policy learning process" that deliberately attempts to "adjust the goals or techniques of policy in the light of past experience and new information" (Hall 1990: 7). Hence, they establish a set of cognitive and moral maps that orient them towards a policy sphere. This set works as a tool identifying problems, specifying and prioritizing leaders' interests and goals (Bleich 2002) and thus, making their discourses comprehensive, convincing and legitimate (Campbell 1998: 381).
Coined by Peter Hall, we are referring to this system as the "policy paradigm" 19 . Paradigms constitute broad cognitive constraints on the range of solutions that actors perceive and deem serviceable for solving problems. They generally reside in their cognitive backgrounds as underlying theoretical and ontological assumptions about the nature of the conflict. Their effects are profound here in the sense that they define the terrain of the "securitizing discourses" (Hall 1993;Lau et al 1991). For Hall, policy paradigms guide learning processes through which existing policy legacies are evaluated and criticized.
Through the delineation of the contexts mentioned above, we could identify and document these historical and legal lessons that the leaders have pulled up in order to draft their line of argumentation in the light of the recent developments. Via the discourse analysis we conducted, and by broadening the amount of data, we could figure out how the "legacies of history" and "traumas of the past" might have come into the leaders' phraseology while facing current challenges. We could find out whether and in which manner historical examples, deriving from the past, had been used by the leaders in order to establish their energy security discourses. This could, thus, illustrate the functionality that the historical context displays, as part of the "accessibility' indicator.