Under the shadow of civilizationist populist discourses

This article explores the extent and limits of anti-immigration discourse in recent political debates in Turkey. Anti-immigrant discourses have been at the heart of exclusionary populisms, where right-wing political actors present immigrants as economic, social and security threats. It is remarkable that this is not yet the case in Turkey, one of the world’s major refugee-receiving countries. Using an original dataset, composed of party programmes, parliamentary records and public statements by presidential candidates in the last two rounds of general and presidential elections between 2014 and 2018, we argue that politicians from both incumbent and opposition parties in Turkey have used the ‘refugee card’ to appeal to the growing social, economic and cultural grievances of their voters but in a rather limited and divergent manner. Debates over migration have oscillated between the Western European right-wing populist perception of ‘threat’ and the pro-Syrian and civilizationist populism of the ruling party that relies on a transnational notion of ‘ummah’

How Covid-19 financially hit urban refugees: evidence from mixed-method research with citizens and Syrian refugees in Turkey

Peering through a lens of disasters and inequalities, this article measures the financial impacts of Covid-19 on citizens and refugee communities in Turkey during a relatively early phase of the global pandemic. Our data comes from an online survey (N = 1749) conducted simultaneously with Turkish citizens and Syrian refugees living in Turkey, followed by in-depth online interviews with Syrian refugees. Our findings indicate that the initial Covid-19 measures had a higher financial impact on Syrians than on citizens when controlled for employment, wealth, and education, among other variables. In line with the literature, our research confirms that disasters’ socio-economic effects disproportionally burden minority communities. We additionally discuss how Covid-19 measures have significantly accelerated effects on refugees compared to the local population, mainly due to the structural and policy context within which forcibly displaced Syrians have been received in Turkey

Editorial

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Negotiating mobility, debating borders: migration diplomacy in Turkey-EU relations

The concepts of 'citizenship' and 'border' have rarely been systematically brought together. New Border and Citizenship Politics challenges this, examining the intersections and dynamics of bordering processes and citizenship politics. Case-studies from the United States, Europe, the Mediterranean and Australia illuminate the connections, exploring the politics of redesigning borders, technologies of bordering and citizenship as border politics. The collection offers comprehensive coverage of bordering dynamics by transcending a state-centered perspective and taking the political agency of migrants into account, approaching the subject of borders as a genuine political and socially constructed phenomenon, focusing on its dynamic, conflictive and productive character. Arguing that international borders are key sites of regulation and struggles about belonging and mobility, the contributors stress the contested politics around borders and citizenship, and migrants themselves become both subjects and objects of politics