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ABSTRACT
This article addresses the question of how to understand the relation among precarity, differential inclusion, and citizenship status with regard to Syrian refugees in Turkey. Turkey has become host to over 2.7 million Syrian refugees who live in government-run refugee camps and urban centres. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration studies literature, the paper emphasises the Turkish government’s central legal and policy frameworks that provide Syrians with some citizenship rights while simultaneously regulating their status and situating them in a position of limbo. Syrians are not only making claims to citizenship rights but they are also negotiating their access to social services, humanitarian assistance, and employment in different ways. The analysis stresses that Syrian refugees in Turkey continue to be part of the multiple pathways to precarity, differential inclusion, and negotiated citizenship rights.
Acknowledgements
We would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the research for this paper. We extend our gratitude to the refugees who took the time to speak with us and provide us with valuable insights and knowledge. We thank the representatives of humanitarian, NGO, and community organisations who spoke with us, and our research assistant, Maissaa Almustafa, for her valuable fieldwork assistance in Turkey. We acknowledge with appreciation the three doctoral students who transcribed the participant interviews: Maissaa Almustafa, Derya Tarhan, and Angela Willmott. Lead authorship alternates with every study produced through our collaboration. An earlier version of this article was presented before the conference on Governing Migration from the Margins, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada, November 2015.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The other states are Congo, Madagascar, and Monaco (Hathaway Citation2005, 97).
2. ‘Suruç Çadır Kenti Açıldı’, 5 March 2015, AFAD Haberler, available at: https://www.afad.gov.tr/TR/HaberDetay.aspx?IcerikID=3410&ID=5
3. There are, however, occasions when Syrians in refugee camps respond to the limits imposed upon them and constitute themselves as political subjects who engage in acts of citizenship prior to being legally or discursively recognized as such by state authorities. As with other refugees’ struggles in camps (e.g. Ilcan Citation2014; Citation2013; Rygiel Citation2012, Citation2014), Syrians are enacting themselves as claimants in the spaces of the camp. They are voicing grievances about: the conditions of the camp, access to food, security matters (Dinçer et al. Citation2013), and overcrowding (Burch and Berberoglu 2012). They are emphasising social justice concerns and electing committees to express these concerns to the state (see Özden Citation2013, 7) which in turn articulates their demand for rights or what some might refer to as ‘incipient citizenships’ (Isin and Nyers Citation2014, 9–10).
4. Despite the geographical limitation of its refugee regime, Kirişci (Citation2014, 8) asserts that ‘with 45,000 applications in 2013, Turkey became the fifth largest recipient of individual asylum seekers among forty-four industrialized countries’.
5. In urban centres, muhtar is an elected local administrative responsible for issuing registrations and other relevant official documents in districts and neighborhoods in urban centers.
6. Only 118 Syrians in 2011; 220 in 2012, 794 in 2013 and 2541 in 2014 received work permits (Oner and Genç Citation2015, 256).