30 research outputs found
Under the shadow of civilizationist populist discourses: Political debates on refugees in Turkey
Under the shadow of civilizationist populist discourses: Political debates on refugees in Turkey
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’
Umut Erel, Migrant women transforming citizenship: life-stories from Britain and Germany
Reading diasporic engagements through the lens of citizenship: Turkey as a test case
Diaspora policies have recently become prominent for an increasing number of states. While the growing body of
literature on new diaspora policies and institutions has shown these as a sign of a state's willingness to include
populations from abroad into the polity, an equally new adjacent literature has emphasised the exclusive and
controlling aspect of extra-territorial power of authoritarian states. This article argues that a consideration of cooccurrence
of positive and negative diaspora politics is needed for a holistic understanding of state-led transnationalism
and its contested relationship to national territory and popular sovereignty. In this article, we build
on the example of Turkish policies, which on the one hand took considerable steps to include its citizens abroad
and on the other continued the exclusion of the ‘enemies of the state’ and re-defined the limits of political
membership at home and abroad. By analysing the new diasporic institutional practices, the enfranchisement of
external citizens and the right to exit along with loss of citizenship provisions, we show that Turkish state policy
disrupts the assumed holy trinity of nation-state-territory forging a de-territorialised unity between internal and
external citizens, as well as a de-territorialised division along the lines of party loyalty. Looking at diasporic
engagements in all three dimensions - institutional, political and legal-through the lens of citizenship, we demonstrate
that they are neither the extension of a heavy handed extra-territorial state power nor of an allinclusive
diaspora policy but a more complex combination of the two