https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2918-2624
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ABSTRACT
This article explores how European border management policies, together with Turkey’s stratified citizenship system for Syrian refugees and Turkish nationalism, shape the urban daily lives of Syrian women refugees in Izmir, Turkey. In 2019 we conducted in-depth interviews and a mapping exercise with 20 Syrian refugee women in Izmir to explore how their urban mobility patterns and struggles to access spaces of social reproduction shape gendered and racialized relations within the city of Izmir. Most Syrian refugees live in extreme poverty and their encounters with public spaces in Izmir are shaped by a stratified citizenship system. Together with the profitability of the exploitation of immigrant labor, this system’s neoliberal and patriarchal peculiarities place social reproduction duties on women’s shoulders. Women’s reproductive and care-giving responsibilities constitute the core of their relationship with the city and their cartographies of urban mobility. Turkey’s ambiguous “temporary protection” regime combined with racialized nationalism produce gendered interior borders which shape Syrian women’s their mobility and access to spaces of social reproduction, such as parks and hospitals, in the city of Izmir.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all participants for sharing their experiences. We also would like to acknowledge two anonymous reviewers and editors of the Special Issue for their diligent work and meticulous comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the GenUrb conference, entitled Feminist Explorations of Urban Futures (FEUF) in September 2019.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 There are important exceptions, such as those publications that focus on gender-based violence that refugee women face (Karakılıç et al., Citation2019; UN Women, Citation2018; Yaman, Citation2020), the stigmatization of refugee women by Turkey’s welfare system and its workers (Atasü-Topcuoglu, Citation2020), and the structural barriers refugee women face in accessing fundamental services (UN Women, Citation2018).
2 We use the term refugee, for all people seeking asylum from the Turkish state regardless of their official status.
3 Turkey received 3.8 million refugees in 2018 primarily from Syria (IOM, Citation2018), as of 2020, the number of refugees in Turkey is 3.9 and 3.6 million of them are Syrian (UNHCR, Citation2020).
4 This prioritisation was adopted in the 2013 Law on Foreigners and International Protection (LFIP) and detailed in the Regulation on Temporary Protection (2014).
5 Even though the right to work has been granted, it is not automatically provided. The employer must apply for a work permit for the refugee employee.
6 By mid-2021, the EU will have allocated 6 billion Euros since 2016 (“EU Facility,”, Citation2019; Yıldırım et al., Citation2019).
7 The Refugee Desk aims to operate as a coordination body for refugees, the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality and the NGOs that provide services to refugees. It was established in September 2020 and has been slow in its operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Its activities are various, such as providing capacity building training for municipality employees and support for delivering emergency services to refugees after events such as earthquakes.
8 A stunt double in several popular TV series, originally from Egypt, who was beaten on a bus in Istanbul, after being mistaken for a Syrian is only one of several examples of the xenophobia contributing to racialization processes (Arab News, Citation2020).
9 We asked our participants whether there are places where they consider insecure while traveling to their destination. Here, we looked for places where they feel anxious, and/or places where they feel lost and/or places where they think they might get attacked and/or harassed.
10 We have no intention of making comparisons with this limited number of participants.
11 This unfortunate and hostile idea is common among even leading researchers and NGOs in the Syrian refugee field. For example, see Tuncel (Citation2019) and Mülteciler Derneği (Citationn.d).
12 Administrative processes for the ESSN, including acceptance of applications and evaluations, are undertaken jointly by Kızılay (Turkish Red Crescent) and the local branches of the Turkish State’s Social Assistance and Solidarity Foundation. Syrian refugees who are not registered or who are registered in a city other than where they reside are not eligible to receive assistance.
13 The following are the criteria for qualifying for ESSN: Single women between 18 and 59 years old, who are without any family; single parents between 18 and 59 years old, with no other adults in the family and with more than one child, younger than 18; elderly people older than 60 years old without any family; families with a disabled member; families with more than four children; and families with 1.5 or higher average with regard to number of dependents (Turkish Red Crescent, Citation2020).
14 Only two of the participants had incomes higher than 3000 TL (approximately US$555). Two of the participants did not provide income information. The equivalence to the US dollar is calculated for August 2019 based on a conversion rate of 5.4 TL/US$ (Cuevas, Citation2020).
15 This value is the poverty line and it corresponds to US$5.5 per day in 2011 purchasing power parity (PPP), calculated by the World Bank for purposes of monitoring poverty in upper middle-income countries such as Turkey. The currency of the US dollar is calculated at 5.4 TL, for August, 2019 (Cuevas, Citation2020).
16 This value of US$3.20 per capita, per day in 2011 PPP, is calculated by the World Bank for purposes of monitoring poverty in upper middle-income countries like Turkey.
17 There have been cases where Turkish patients sought priority access to healthcare based on citizenship status when there were Syrian refugees also waiting for access (Yıldırım et al., Citation2019).
18 Syrian refugee populations under 18 years old constitute 53.2% of the total Syrian refugee population living in Turkey (Mülteciler Derneği [Refugees Association], Citation2021).
19 The rest of the thirteen participants chose hospitals for their proximity, and/or they were taken to a specific hospital by an ambulance or they were referred by another hospital.
20 For anonymity we used a coding system, based on the neighborhood’s first letter (a pseudonym is given to the neighborhood) and sequence of interviewees. For example, A-6 means sixth interviewee in Aydınlık neighborhood.
21 A discount chain market widespread in Turkey.
22 The implications of HES codes for unregistered refugees in Turkey has received little attention from the mainstream media. For more on the details on the issue, see Kronos (Citation2021) https://kronos34.news/tr/ulasimda-hes-kodu-uygulamasi-basliyor-kayitsiz-multeciler-ne-yapacak/