The politics of international migratory regimes: Transit migration flows in Turkey

Since the early 1960s the relationship of Western European countries with Turkey has been intertwined with the high profile of migration. In the 1980s and 1990s it has been dominated by transit migration and asylum issues, and continues to develop as a hot debate on what should be done about them. With this background, the present article investigates transit migration and refugee flows in Turkey, evaluates its wider context of the formation of migration, asylum and refugee regimes between Turkey and Europe, and relates the issue of transit migration to the ongoing dynamics of globalisation. It explores the ways in which transit migration flows are associated with the politics of international migration. It does so by taking a careful look at the politics of international migratory regimes (IMRs), interpreting the word 'regime' very loosely to mean a regulatory system which operates in certain interests and distributes powers and advantages or disadvantages. It argues that the globalisation of human mobility has helped to extend international migratory movements in a form of international regulatory system

Globalization, civil society and citizenship in Turkey: Actors, boundaries and discourses

In recent years, civil society has become one of the most important concerns of academic and public discourse. It would not be a mistake to propose that today there is a strong, effective and even over-glorified talk about and a global agenda for civil society and its role in the process of creating a better and humane world. In this talk and agenda the main intention is to reinvigorate and strengthen civil society politically, organizationally and normatively as a counter- hegemonic and resistance movement against the state-centric world. This paper argues that Turkey does not constitute an exception in this context. Rather, it provides an illuminating case-study in which the crisis of the state-centric modernity has given rise to the elevation of civil society to the status of being an exteremely important actor and arena for the democratization of the state-society relations. However, on the basis of the three-year-long research (1999-2002) we have done on 'the impacts of globalization on Turkey', the paper also argues that the role of civil society in the process of democratization should be considered a necessary but not a sufficient condition, insofar as it contains both democratic and essentialist discourses about citizenship and identity. In order to substantiale these arguments, the paper will first outline the internal and external factors that have paved the way to the emergence and the increasing importance of civil society in Turkey, and then will shift its attention to the question of 'the use and the abuse of civil society'. In seeking a proper answer to this question, the paper will focus on the discourses and strategies of different civil society organizations about state, society, citizenship and identity in Turkey

Becoming a new citizen in an immigration country: Turks in Australia and Sweden and some comparative implications

[No abstract available

The ethnic question in an environment of insecurity: the Kurds in Turkey

This article examines the effect that a poor structural context, what we term an "environment of insecurity", has on the Kurdish ethnic nationalist mobilization in Turkey. The empirical evidence for this analysis is based on data from the 1993 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey [TDHS]. The data provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first reliable and representative figures on the situation of Kurds in Turkey. Our key claim is that the Kurdish population in Turkey is relatively much worse off than the Turkish population in the country. This claim is strongly supported by the data. Many other factors also account for the ethnic nationalist mobilization, but we argue that the Turkish Kurds' environment of insecurity, materially and non-materially, stands out as a key package of both causal and intermediate variables behind the ethnic revival

Socio-economic development and international migration: A Turkish study

The root causes of international migration have been the subject of many studies, a vast majority of which are based on development theories dominated by economy-oriented perspectives. An underlying assumption is that poverty breeds migration. The results, and the conclusions drawn from these studies, differ widely. For instance, whether emigration increases when poverty becomes more extreme, or less extreme, or why it reaches certain levels, are issues on which research still offers a mixed answer. This article investigates the relationship between economic development and migration by taking into consideration the degrees of economic development that form thresholds for migration. It focuses on recent evidence on the development-emigration relationship in Turkey which reflects a dimension of the dynamics and mechanisms facilitating or restricting migratory flows from the country. Using data from the 1995 District-level Socio-economic Development Index of Turkey (DSDI) and the 1990 Census, the principal aim of the article is to provide an analytical base which identifies degrees of local level of development in Turkey, relate these to international migration flows, and examine patterns of the development-migration relationship