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Forced migration, citizenship, and space: the case of Syrian Kurdish refugees in İstanbul

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 August 2016

Gülay Kılıçaslan
Gülay Kılıçaslan*
Affiliation:
York University, Department of Sociology, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada, kilicaslangulay@gmail.com.
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Abstract

The influx of hundreds of thousands of people from Syria to Turkey, especially into major cities such as İstanbul, together with the Turkish government’s policies towards Syrian refugees, has led to various changes in urban spaces. This article has a twofold objective: it examines and discusses the everyday lives of these refugees with regards to the processes and mechanisms of their exclusion and inclusion in İstanbul, while employing a multiscalar analysis of migration in terms of combining nation-state policies of migration, citizenship, space, and the concept of the “right to the city.” Relying upon interviews and participant observation in the Kanarya and Bayramtepe neighborhoods of İstanbul between 2011 and 2015, I outline the ways in which Syrian Kurdish refugees have been actively transforming İstanbul’s peripheries through their interactions with the Kurds who were forcibly displaced from their rural homes in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s.

Keywords

Forced migrationcitizenshipright to the citySyrian Kurdish refugeesinternally displaced Kurds.
Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 54: Special Issue on Precarious Lives and Syrian Refugees in Turkey , May 2016 , pp. 77 - 95
Copyright
© New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

Author’s Note: Earlier versions of this article were presented in İstanbul and Toronto in 2015 and 2016. I am greatly indebted to all those who helped me to think through these issues. I especially thank Mine Eder, Sardar Saadi, Shahrzad Mojab, and Shoshana Fine for their constructive comments, suggestions, and support. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable insights and comments.

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