Introduction

Abstract

Just after the local elections in 2019, irregular migrants in Istanbul faced a months-long crackdown. The Ministry of Interior from the Justice and Development Party government (known as AK Party or AKP) gave Syrians until 20 August 2019 to return to the cities in which they were first registered. Although the time period was eventually extended, the internal controls for migrants became stricter. Migrants found themselves frequently stopped by police, and officers visited registration addresses to check if they were occupied. If irregularities were discovered, the official directive was that Syrians should be returned to the cities in which they were first registered. For non-Syrian migrants without registration, the result of police stops was often being confined to pre-detention centres. According to the Head of the Directorate General Management of Migration (DGMM) of the time, Abdullah Ayaz, “Operations in Istanbul target irregular migrants such as Afghans and Pakistanis. Even if Syrians are found without registration at all, they are not deported, unlike the claims in the media. It is not possible to issue deportation decisions legally about Syrians due to the conditions in Syria” (AA 2019).

1.1 Introduction

Just after the local elections in 2019, irregular migrants in Istanbul faced a months-long crackdown. The Ministry of Interior from the Justice and Development Party government (known as AK Party or AKP) gave Syrians until 20 August 2019 to return to the cities in which they were first registered. Although the time period was eventually extended, the internal controls for migrants became stricter. Migrants found themselves frequently stopped by police, and officers visited registration addresses to check if they were occupied. If irregularities were discovered, the official directive was that Syrians should be returned to the cities in which they were first registered. For non-Syrian migrants without registration, the result of police stops was often being confined to pre-detention centres. According to the Head of the Directorate General Management of Migration (DGMM) of the time, Abdullah Ayaz, “Operations in Istanbul target irregular migrants such as Afghans and Pakistanis. Even if Syrians are found without registration at all, they are not deported, unlike the claims in the media. It is not possible to issue deportation decisions legally about Syrians due to the conditions in Syria” (AA 2019).

However, lawyers and national and international human rights organizations described the summer of 2019 as being terrible for all migrants in terms of the numbers of rushed deportations and full busses of people from Istanbul being taken to border provinces and removal centres. There were reports of deportations of Syrians who had been coerced into signing voluntary return forms. There is a common belief among political commenators that the campaign in 2019 was driven by domestic political motives and a desire to give the message that the Government is solving the Syrian ‘refugee problem’ and maintaining ‘order and security’ in Istanbul, where more than a million migrants live irregularly. The operation was specific to Istanbul, raising questions about why the decision was not taken in Ankara and other cities but instead remained a local initiative. It does not seem to be a coincidence that it happened just after the ruling party’s loss of mayorship in the same city. A few months later, Turkey started a cross-border military operation in Northern Syria, legitimized by the objective of repatriation and border security. It seems that there were multiple intersecting political -both domestic and regional- concerns and aims on the table at the same time, which had direct consequences for the lives of refugees in Turkey. Not surprisingly, these and previous incidents created “a strong fear among refugees that panicked them specifically in election times,” a humanitarian worker related. Many Syrian friends told us that they had not left their apartments in months because they were terrified. Nevertheless, some deportees returned to Istanbul after a few weeks, this time feeling more susceptible to deportation, and many others tried to become less visible in public spaces. Simultaneously, they become more vulnerable to exploitation in their informal workplaces. Refugees’ precarious situation only worsened when COVID-19 arrived.

This incident in Istanbul in 2019 is only one among many that illustrate temporality, complexity and agency—some of main the topics of this book--within the system of refugee governance in Turkey. Refugee governance is temporal because, despite a long-term, flexible approach on the part of provincial authorities towards the internal mobility of Syrians, the approach gradually changed when the political actor(s) decided to enforce a reception rule stating that Syrians have to live where they are first registered. The timing of the enforcement of this is strategic as it happened just after elections and just before a cross-border military operation. Once again, it became clear that Syrians’ temporary protection status puts them in a precarious situation. The events in Istanbul in 2019 can also be seen as rather complex because the regulations for Syrians and non-Syrians, such as Afghans and Pakistanis, were quite different. This was clearly mentioned by the DGMM Director. The event also illustrates the agency of migrants, regardless of their nationality or legal status, as they looked for opportunities to re-migrate to Istanbul or found other tactics, such as further invisibility to survive. Sadly, this situation is not a one-time occurrence but is rather a recurring symptom of temporality and a complexity-centred approach to refugee hosting in Turkey.

Conflict-induced forced migration has marked the last decade of flows in different parts of the world, from South Asia to Africa, and from the Middle East to Europe. Protection, reception and integration policies, practices and humanitarian responses to forced migration in contemporary Europe and beyond are of great concern for state actors, non-state actors, international organizations, institutions, private individual actors and people on the move. The so-called Refugee Crisis in 2015 and the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed again how refugees are vulnerable to rapid changes due to external factors in different countries and across the world. The vast majority of forced migrants are only able to reach neighbouring countries, such as Turkey, Lebanon, Pakistan, Jordan, Bangladesh, Colombia, Uganda and others.

One of these countries, Turkey, has become the main destination for forcibly displaced Syrians from armed conflict since 2011. In 2014, Turkey became the country hosting the largest number of refugees in the world, with more than 3.5 million Syrians. It also continues to be a country of asylum and a transit zone for irregular crossings of thousands of migrants to Europe, such as Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians and others, who were also forced to leave their homes for political and economic reasons. The country’s response to migration, including the roles of its governance actors, policies, politics and refugees themselves, is significant for broader regional and global social, political, economic and cultural developments.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Turkey’s response to Syrian mass migration from 2011 to 2020. It raises the question of how this receiving state responded to the protracted refugee situation and asks: what are the implications of its responses, and how do they change? We refer to a “refugee situation” as one in which there is a context of conflict-induced forced migration, including people displaced by crossing the national borders of their origin country without those individuals being able to claim or acquire official refugee status due to the regulations of the host country, as in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan and many other refugee-hosting countries in the Global South.

In order to respond to the above questions regarding the receiving state’s response to refugee situations, the book focuses on policies and discourses developed during the reception, protection, and integration phases of accommodating refugees, and it focuses on continuities, ruptures, and changes. One goal of the book is to identify interactions and differences in responses across scales -transnational, national, local, individual-; in other words, to examine how policies are translated into local contexts, then how they are felt and experienced by refugees and how refugees claim agency and develop belonging. We look for the ordering principles or mediating factors in the structuring of multilevel responses of various actors and shifts in responses over time.

As an analytical starting point to define a state’s response to refugee situations and this response’s outcome, we suggest a novel abstract concept: strategic temporality. We find strategic temporality to be a useful concept to explain the complexity of policies, practices, and experiences in governing refugee situations. Temporality is a governance strategy that is intentionally produced to control and manage refugee situations. It has institutional, legislative and discursive components that all shape policy instruments addressing displaced people. Temporality also helps to describe asylum seekers’ experience of “being between” and their encounters with locals and the state actors in the host country. We also see temporality in the interventions of local actors. We argue that strategic temporality shapes central state actors’ treatment of the three policy fields of protracted refugee response: reception, protection and integration. Non-state actors, including refugees, international, national, and local actors- navigate and negotiate this temporality. The simultaneous charting of different scales of the migration governance system tells an expansive story of migrant journeys towards full participation in their host societies, constrained by strategic temporality. To better understand experiences at the different scales and accordingly to further elaborate strategic temporality, we introduce three key supporting concepts: liminality, uncertainty and complexity. Liminality refers to the experience of finding oneself temporally or spatially in-between positions. By uncertainty, we mean that actors lack comprehensive knowledge and predictability about the future of the refugee situation. These actors include both policy makers and implementors as well as civil society members, host communities and displaced people themselves. Complexity refers to the complicated legal and institutional arrangements that emerge in response to the refugee situation on the one hand and to entanglements of issue areas (e.g. security, economy, societal dynamics) influencing the policy and politics on the other hand. There is no hierarchy among these supporting concepts. However, liminality is more helpful in explaining the situation experienced by refugees, while complexity and uncertainty are useful for understanding the dynamics embedded in the structure. Four more concepts: multilevelness, stratification, local turn and agency are discussed in detail below as further ways to specific the governance system and the multifaceted responses on the part of actors to strategic temporality.

Positing strategic temporality as the key encompassing characteristic of Turkey’s response to Syrian mass migration enables us to bring more than a few theories and arguments about refugee responses together, including multilevel governance, bordering, assemblage theory, governmentality, ethnography of migration, politics of migration and agent-based theories. This book is particularly engaged with multilevel governance theory, which describes institutions and their relations across levels of policy. We argue that multilevel governance with a “centralist mode” and a “local turn” fit our case, and these features are driven by this strategic temporality. This research further develops the multilevel governance framework by zooming in on interactions between institutions and legal and discursive structures. Moreover, strategic temporality helps us to explain transformations over time observed in these components.

This book challenges the approach of taking refugee policies as a unitary field and suggests unpacking the refugee response by dividing it into reception, protection and integration policy fields. Strategic temporality is reflected in all three areas of governance, from the initial stage to changes in policies over time. In the case of Turkey, reception is temporal in being mainly ad hoc in practice and discourse via the idea of guesthood, hospitality and cultural intimacy. The temporality of protection is explicit, reflected through the adoption of temporary protection status in legislation and co-constitutive practices causing legal precarity and stratification. Integration also shows strategic temporality in its uncertainty and ambiguous fluctuation along an integration-(dis)integration/exclusion spectrum over time.

Given that we understand Turkey’s response to Syrian refugee migration through the lens of strategic temporality, an important question is: who or what makes this temporality strategic? Turkey’s response is multilevel, with a centralist government and state institutions dominating the field but cooperating with non-state and local actors to get support. These institutions undoubtedly have political interests linked to the refugee issue, such as regional or international concerns in security, political economy and foreign policy, and public policy and service provision. Thus, they act strategically as part of the state’s refugee response legitimized within hospitality and guesthood discourses that are embeded temporally. However, institutions are not the sole actors, with local level actors, including refugees themselves demonstrating significant agency. Even non-state actors negotiate this strategic temporality with centralist institutions and thereby open space for themselves to act through subsidiarity. Refugees navigate this strategic temporality to claim belonging and to develop coping mechanisms for survival, and they often feel partially included despite broader conditions of precarity and uncertainty.

The following section explains the concepts used to describe refugee response mechanisms, starting with our key concept, strategic temporality. Then, we describe our understanding of governance and how we conceive strategic temporality as a governance strategy. We also explore how our sub-concepts of liminality and uncertainty are part of strategic temporality and how strategic temporality as a concept addresses common findings in the broader field migration studies. The section that follows is a discussion of complementary sub-themes, such as multi-level governance, the local turn and subsidiarity, which will help us to address the main features of governance from an institutional perspective. Here, we address three dimensions of governance, namely institutional, legal, and discursive. We show that the concepts of stratification and differentiation contribute to expanding the scope of analysis by bringing in social and legal lenses. Next, we will visit the concepts of guesthood and hospitality to explore the discursive dimension of strategic temporality. The final section of the chapter describes the role of the refugee agency within this analytical framework.

1.2 Theoretical Framework: ‘Strategic Temporality’ in Governing Mass Migration

Migration studies increasingly focus on time and temporality to understand displacement experiences and the governing of the displacement (Brun, 2016; Baas & Yeoh, 2019). Time is becoming a more common theoretical lens for illuminating different migration profiles (Krasteva, 2021). Arguably, temporality is a key feature of the asylum-seeking and refugee experience. A number of studies point out temporality’s salience in defining contemporary migration and asylum regimes (Biehl, 2015; Horst & Grabska, 2015; Nassar & Stel, 2019, 2020; Pascucci, 2016). Temporality emerges as a vital element in governing asylum at borders, refugee camps, reception centres, detention units or urban spaces in Europe, Americas and elsewhere (Andersson, 2014; El Shaarawi, 2015; Griffiths, 2014). Linking temporality with the concept of governance, we approach temporality as a strategy that is intentionally produced to control and manage displaced people by governing actors. Regarding refugees’ experience, temporality also tells us about how asylum seekers go through the experience of being in-between. In our understanding, temporality goes along with and is used synonymously with other concepts common in migration studies, such as uncertainty and ambiguity, or most importantly, liminality.

Originating in anthropological studies and broadly applied in the social and political sciences, liminality refers to the “experience of finding oneself at a boundary or in an in-between position, either temporally or spatially” (Thomassen, 2015, 40). As Turner (1969) described it, liminality is a transitional space in ritual from one status or stage of life to another. The liminal state can be one of violence, humiliation and reconfiguration (Turner, 1967). For migrants, liminality refers to a social position of in-betweenness that is increasingly long and at times indefinite in refugee situations. Refugehood in the host country is traditionally conceived as a transitory period and is expected to end with more permanent inclusion either there or elsewhere. However, refugees often remain in a state of liminality in a legal, psychological, social and economic sense; in other words, they find themselves in legal and political limbo for many years, if not decades. Research has shown that this has been the case for Palestinians, Afghans, Somalis and others in a wide variety of national contexts. Rather than a process of quick incorporation, the asylum process –the legal and bureaucratic procedures that turn asylum seekers into refugees – is a dialectical process in which the national population reinforces its social boundaries and determines its ‘others’ who will be placed in legal and administrative limbo. Thus, many refugee groups are left in periods of liminality indefinitely through protracted displacement. To that end, liminality relates to temporality, in the sense of referring to an existential temporal in-betweenness or being in an in-between socio-temporal zone. Undoubtedly, protracted liminality produces a feeling of uncertainty, and it is itself a result of uncertainty. Hence, literature on forced displacement makes extensive references to uncertainty as a situation, as an analytical concept and as a narrative (Schiltz et al., 2019). In basic terms, uncertainty means lacking knowledge and predictability about the future. For refugees, as Horst and Grabska note, “uncertainty is not about calculating risk-taking but coping through hope, waiting, negotiating, and navigating” (2015, 5). Conflict-induced forced displacement generates radical and protracted uncertainty. Not only displaced people but also receiving communities and countries face uncertainty in such situations. States themselves play a role in constructing the spatial and temporal dimension of uncertainty that displaced people experience because states’ formal policies and practices first tend to marginalize refugees and then create measures to manage this uncertainty. They tend to build migration management systems on uncertainty.

Liminality is uncertain because it is paradoxical. It is a ‘permanent impermanence’ that defines the increasingly protracted nature of most refugee situations and results in ad hoc arrangements and a ‘dominance of the short-term’ (Stel, 2021). Liminality even functions as a governance mechanism and turns into a norm for global and national migration management. For example, describing this as a politics of uncertainty and institutional ambiguity, Nora Stel (2020) argues that Lebanon, hosting the highest number of refugees per capita worldwide, has endemic ambiguity in its policy making. Disagreeing with explanations for the situation that highlight host state fragility and related capacity problems, she attributes this ambiguity to a lack of political will to create coherent and comprehensive rules of engagement to address the refugee ‘crises’. Thus, institutional ambiguity appears to be a governance strategy for responding to the Syrian refugee crisis (Nassar & Stel, 2019).

Similarly, Kelsey Norman (2020) describes refugee reception policies in the Middle East and North Africa as “reluctant”. These countries in the Global South show their reluctance to host refugees via strategic indifference and delegation of refugee protection to the international community (Abdelaaty, 2021; Norman, 2020). This indifference and delegation take the form of leaving the managerial and economic costs of hosting refugees to international organizations, as observed in Lebanon and Jordan (Şahin Mencütek, 2018). Countries’ broader international interests (e.g., maintaining ‘good host’ reputations in the international community, securing development aid and/or foreign policy goals vis a vis the sending state) shape the contours of these policies and possible changes over time (Abdelaaty, 2021; Şahin Mencütek, 2018; Norman, 2020). Interstate relations and co-ethnicity with refugees also influence the reception by host states (Abdelaaty, 2021). Although culturally similar groups may initially enjoy some welcome and privileges, they are often subject to similar insecurities that other refugees and asylum seekers go through in the host country, mainly depending on the protraction of their stay and legal status (Abdelaaty, 2021; Norman, 2020).

Liminality and uncertainty result in large part from the temporality at the centre of the global refugee regime, which is apparent in the use of statuses like “temporary protection.” Temporary protection in most parts of the world is used to respond to mass migration situations and to comply with the non-refoulment obligation without ensuring refugee status. It is codified by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) guidelines and the EU’s directives (Ineli-Ciger, 2015). While on the one side, temporary protection extends protection to a broader set of people than those covered by the Convention’s refugee definition; on the other side, it is used primarily to deter asylum applications and hinder displaced people’s settlement. In practice, it works as a government strategy to ensure that the ability of refugees to access status is controlled by the state’s discretion (Crock & Bones, 2015). Temporality is not unique to mass migration cases because individual asylum applications may also result in temporary legal protection and years of waiting, under uncertainty and ambiguity, as experienced in Europe or North America (Kaya & Nagel, 2021). However, temporary protection is particularly difficult for migrants as it results in the sense of being in “existential limbo”: a subjective and temporal state of being in which the asylum system, in the present moment, is understood as a locus of suffering and in which life and meaning-making are defined by a sense of immobility (Haas, 2017, 75).

As many studies indicate, migration is constituted in and through multiple and relational temporalities. As one component of temporalities, waiting is created in specific legal, material, and socio-cultural situations (Jacobsen et al., 2020, 1). Temporality creates forms of precarity and ambiguities in the material and socio-cultural experiences of refugees. Suzan Ilcan and colleagues argue, “precarity of space as demonstrated through the challenges refugees experience in accessing services and with restricted mobility and precarity of movement as developed through new border cooperation arrangements and through migrant journeys that are undertaken in search of greater protection and security” (Ilcan et al., 2018, 51). Refugees develop strong feelings of worry and uncertainty due to their legal limbo situations. The absence of a clear legal status in conjunction with the lack of information about access to public services and rights, results in risks of physical and mental health deterioration and considerably harms future integration possibilities (Nagel & Reeger, 2021).

Temporality has so far mainly been adopted to describe migrants’ experiences or legal statuses and has rarely been linked to the governance literature (exceptions Abdelaaty, 2021; Stel, 2021). This book argues that temporality performs a critical governance strategy. It dominates the interactions among actors engaging in the destination country’s response to the refugee migration. Our concept of strategic temporality places the liminality and uncertainty that other migration scholars have noted into a governance framework. The chapters in this book further the argument about temporality as a governance strategy by drawing from an in-depth case study on Turkey’s refugee response.

Our empirical case illustrates how strategic temporality operates in practice and to what ends. In the case of Turkey, strategic temporality works through the mechanism of granting uncertain temporal legal status to forcibly displaced Syrians, putting them in ad hoc reception arrangements and exposing them to short-term changes in integration measures, exceptions or derogation from norms. We argue that this is strategic because temporality is intertwined with the politics of forced migration. Temporality is intentionally enhanced to open space for central state actors to consistently recalibrate governing practices, including regulations, tactics and discourses.

In addition to humanitarian considerations, domestic and international politics are always on the table in responding to refugee flows (Braithwaite et al., 2019; Gökalp-Aras, 2019; Kaya, 2021), often identified as the politics of migration (Weinar et al., 2019). Keeping temporality at the centre is a kind of strategic reaction of policymakers to the unpredictability and uncertainty of conflict-created displacement, possible spillover or political (in)stability in the host country and public attitudes towards hosting refugee populations as well as the burden-sharing of the international community. Hence, the strategic temporality approach is aimed at returning refugees to the country of origin or moving them elsewhere, such as to Europe, as early as possible. Although the protraction of crisis and strict border policies mean that both return and onward migration are only limitedly possible options for most refugees, changing public attitudes lead policymakers to continue the discourse of temporality, again strategically, this time for domestic political purposes.

Accordingly, temporality is reflected in the individual experiences of displaced people who are inhibited from pursuing important dimensions of integration (i.e., obtaining long-term, safe shelter, freedom of movement, political rights and secure employment). In this sense, migrants’ agency - their ability to act - is limited, and feelings of belonging are reduced. Instead of genuinely settling and becoming a member of their new communities, migrants are forced to rely on short-term planning, to react to ever-changing circumstances, and frequently to use ad hoc emergency measures.

1.3 Conceptual Clusters Explaining Migration Governance

As rightly pointed out by Anna Krasteva, “the temporality and migration nexus is a relatively new arena in migration scholarship, and this nexus forms different conceptual clusters (2021 p.178). In this book, we introduce strategic temporality as a theoretical way to zoom-in on a certain migration profile – asylum migration - and to understand the experience of liminality, uncertainty and complexity that has been widely described in migration studies. In this section, we complement this zooming-in with other more operative concepts for explaining how strategic temporality is embedded in various responses to given refugee situations. These concepts are complexity governance, stratification, local turn, and agency, which will be elaborated below. Through adapting these concepts to the case of Turkey, we are able to better explain legal/institutional frameworks, reception and integration.

Thus, we link strategic temporality with current conceptual and theoretical discussions in migration and refugee studies and with the interdisciplinary perspectives of political science, anthropology, law, and sociology. The logic behind our selection of conceptual clusters, which will be discussed in this section, is as follows. There is a complex structure of actors, layers and policies -as many studies have already pointed out, so our first step is to map the available theories addressing the complexity of migration management. We identify what we mean by refugee governance in this study. Drawing from the extensive scholarship of migration and migration governance, we suggest systematically unpacking this complex governance by focusing on at least three dimensions: institutional, legal and political-discursive. To capture institutions involved in governance and relations among them, we rely on multilevel governance and the idea of a local turn. Then we move on to elaborate the legal dimensions.

The empirical findings of the study signal stratification as theories that may explain the socio-legal dimension of the governance case in Turkey. From an anthropological perspective, hospitality and cultural intimacy appear to be useful, not only to describe relations between locals and refugees but also the discursive choices of policymakers. These concepts help us to understand agency, which is our final key operative concept as it enables us to explore how differently positioned actors reflect upon and react to the refugee situation.

1.3.1 Complexity of Governance

Current studies have drawn our attention to the growing complexity of policies in all areas of migration being formulated at various levels of governance, including global, transnational, regional, national and local levels (Lavanex, 2016; Scholten, 2020). The complexity is identified through theories of polycentrism (Mencütek, 2021), fragmentation (Geddes, 2018; King, 2019), decoupling (Panizzon & van Riemsdijk, 2019; Scholten, 2016) and contradictions (den Hertog, 2016) in governance, with the risk of “layering” in such a way that policies are developed at different government layers without structural connections. This book unpacks the complexity of policies and their implications, drawing from an in-depth case study on Turkey, with an eye to addressing the need for a nuanced understanding that highlights changes across spatial and temporal axes.

We define governance as “the amalgamation of a more or less formal set of policies, programmes, and structures that are formulated and implemented in interaction with multiple actors in order to manage an entry, reception/protection and integration” of internationally displaced people (Şahin Mencütek, 2018, 9). Governance is complex and fragmented, not only because of an encompassing patchwork of dynamic legal, discursive and institutional dimensions that are highly interactive but also due to the highly politicised character of migration policies and their social implications (Geddes, 2018). This complexity stems from immigration and integration intersecting with other related regimes such as welfare, citizenship, and mobility (Boucher & Gest, 2015; Peutz & De Genova, 2010; Sainsbury, 2006). As this book will discuss at length, we understand refugee governance as a complex policy field with a strong attachment to other political domains, such as social policy, domestic security, and international politics.

This complexity of governance can be unpacked by focusing on at least three intertwined dimensions: institutional, legal and discursive. In the case of Turkey, it is possible to trace strategic temporality across each of these dimensions as we do in the relevant chapters. Here, we need some analytical tools to specify these dimensions.

1.3.2 Multilevel Governance and the Local Turn as Institutional Components of Strategic Temporality

To explain the complex institutional dimensions of governance, migration scholars have found the concept of multilevel governance (MLG) to be helpful (Panizzon & van Riemsdijk, 2019, 3; Scholten & Penninx, 2016). MLG was initially defined as the dispersion of authority away from central governments – upwards to the supranational level, downwards to subnational jurisdictions, and sideways to public-private networks (Hooghe & Marks, 2001; Scholten, 2020). The interpretative lens of MLG emphasizes the question of who the actors and institutions involved in governing migration are and what types of modes of interactions and political-legal commitments they have. MLG focuses on several policy levels, including global, supranational, regional, national, and local, where migration policies are formed.

MLG explores how these policy-making levels interact, contradict and can be compromised and have been systematically theorised through four modes of multilevelness: centralist, localist, multilevel and decoupled mode (Scholten & Penninx, 2016). The centralist mode of governance aims to bring policy convergence via top-down approaches with a clear hierarchy between government levels. In the localist type, local governments frame migration policies, including reception in a specific local way, which in turn leads to policy divergence. The multilevel governance type is one in which there is an interaction between the various levels of government without the clear dominance of one level, which engenders some convergence between policy frames at different levels, produced and sustained by their mutual interactions. The decoupled type refers to the absence of any meaningful policy coordination between levels, hence disengagement from initial cooperation and mutual support to increase their mandates and power (Scholten, 2013: 93–94). In addition, the semantics of cooperation does not necessarily imply a level playing field. In refugee governance, state actors are likely to remain in charge of the asylum decision-making process and to retain at least some coordinating role in the actual provision of reception and integration by delegating some of the responsibilities to local governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and private individuals, which has been conceptualized as a local turn and a politics of subsidiarity.

The local turn refers to the delegation of the power of nation-states to municipal authorities and NGOs, Faith-Based Organisations (FBOs) and private individuals. This turn is deepened by neoliberal forms of governmentality and the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations (UN) in 2016 and the EU’s efforts to engage with local governments in the migration control field (Kutz & Wolff, 2020). Local actors used to act as service providers and creators of local discourses and interpreters of central or international discourses on the ground (Lowndes & Polat, 2020). While the local level has been mainly referred to in order to discuss migrant integration (Dekker et al., 2015), it has also been put forward in explaining reception (Oliver et al., 2020) and protection through controlling access to asylum (Artero & Fontanari, 2021, 631). Building on the insights of these studies, we argue that the local turn is not adequate to describe the broader spectrum of actors and the politics behind interactions among governing actors. The concept or principle of subsidiarity may contribute to a better understanding of these interactions (Kaya & Nagel, 2021).

The principle of subsidiarity refers to devolving decision-making in a multilevel governance system to the lowest capable level for achieving the tasks required (such as refugee reception) in order to better engage local bodies, individual actors, and relevant NGOs, but also to preserve strong roles for governments in providing direction, standards, guidelines, incentives and sanctions. We argue that strategic temporality is negotiated and navigated at various levels, mainly at the local level, by actors taking subsidiary roles in providing reception, protection, and integration services. These complexities may be contested or overcome by non-state actors.

However, an emphasis on levels and actor configurations intervening in refugee affairs remains unable to capture the complete picture because they fail to zoom-in fully on the socio-legal components and discourses. Like other policy fields, refugee governance does not have only an institutional dimension; instead, it has critically important legal and discursive components co-constituted by institutions. As the main features of refugee governance are strategic and temporal, it is expected that legislation and discourses create or maintain strategic temporality. Indeed, it does, and we will now discuss stratification in terms of the legal ground where strategic temporality takes place. Then, we move on to a discussion of discourses.

1.3.3 Stratification and Differential Inclusion as Legal Components of Strategic Temporality

The proliferation of immigrant categories and legal statutes attributed to migrants constitute legal precarity, becoming the core of strategic temporality as a governance strategy. These categorizations can be understood with their nuances through the lense of stratification. In general, stratification is about “differential life chances - who gets what and why - and migration is about improving life chances - getting more of the good things of life” (Jasso, 2011). In a given political unit, like a state, social stratification not only relates to differentiation among citizens and non-citizens but also among migrants based on socio-economic factors like wealth, income, education, ethnicity, gender, and others. A key component of stratification is the construction of formal devices of inclusion and exclusion concerning rights. Through the lens of stratified membership theories (Morris, 2002; Joppke, 2007; Olafsdottir & Bakhtiari, 2015; Sainsbury, 2012), it is possible to better understand inequalities among migrant groups and to contextualize refugee governance within the broader citizenship regime of the host country.

Concerning governance, increased differentiation and selectivity of human mobility are recent and essential characteristic features of modern migration controls. Along with the existing dichotomies and categories, such as volunteer versus forced migrants, regular versus irregular migrants, each category is broken down into sub-categories. These categorisations reflect the strategic aim of states to redefine, control, manage and include or exclude migrants. Borders function to control movement and separate citizens from foreigners, but differentiation continues through the legal statuses by inserting migrants into national spaces and defining restrictions and impediments.

For migration control, states categorise migrants in particular ways, and some foreigners under international protection find themselves as being more foreign or less protected than others (Könönen, 2018). As immigration law and refugee protection regimes are an extension of borders, they act as the main instruments in the differential inclusion of non-citizens, and “migration law is at its core a border construction site” (Dauvergne, 2008, 7), which defines the system of boundaries and contributes to the increasing differentiation of immigration. Status-based differentiation functions as a defining conditionality of entry and a key way of delineating categories of migrants (Meissner, 2018, 293). Although status differentiation is based mainly on distinctions between undocumented and temporary, more status multiplication engenders horizontal stratification.

In terms of stratification, highly bureaucratic procedures of international protection result in the fragmentation of examination processes and cause the need to categorise asylum seekers from the start. Newly introduced additional procedures have also resulted in stratified legal statuses with different procedures and specified rights, adding traceable nationality-based discrimination against particular asylum seekers. The hierarchisation of rights invalidates the universalism of rights and produces conditional subjects and asymmetrical social relations. Beyond the exclusive and inclusive role of borders, the concept of differential inclusion can be used to refer to the selective inclusion of migrants within the sphere of rights in the receiving society (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2013). The condition of precarity in which refugees are embedded can be regarded as a common thread, and this pervasive uncertainty encompasses, in many instances, every stage of the national migration system. These conditions are traceable in various stages, from rescue operations and succour to the refugee status determination (RSD) to the set of entitlements bestowed on asylum seekers after they obtain protection or permission to stay.

Differentiated legal statuses and stratifications are very prominent in Turkey’s asylum regime, as will be discussed in the following chapter. These status differences result in differential inclusion concerning the preconditions of residence and access to rights, such as access to the labour market, healthcare services, and education. They create differences among the citizens and non-citizens and the beneficiaries of international protection and foreigners. Therefore, the concept helps us understand Syrians’ and non-Syrians’ reception, protection, and integration in Turkey.

It is worthwhile to note here that strategic temporality embedded in the asylum regime can not just be approached from a legal perspective; it should be treated as a political management strategy. Geopolitical considerations, including security issues and international alliances are entangled with Turkey’s migration and asylum policies and procedures. Since its foundation, Turkey’s migration/asylum policy, including relationships with international refugee law, intersected with Turkey’s international politic aims marked by a general suspicion about Middle Eastern countries, on the one hand, and a goal of improving relations with Western countries on the other. In some time periods, the policies were quite restrictive, as in the early 1990s, on the ground of national security interests (Kirişci, 2012). In other periods, like in the 2000–2013 era, migration policies shifted towards a more liberal direction due to the changes in Turkey’s migration profile, the impact of the new ruling party’s foreign policy objectives, and the European accession process (Icduygu 2014; Elitok, 2013). Successive governments tended to pursue a pragmatic and selective approach to their forced migration governance, even though it simultaneously focused on humanitarianism and moral responsibility (Korkut, 2016). It retained the power to decide how to treat certain migrant groups based on their ethnicity and its foreign policy priorities (Abdelaaty, 2021). In general, it is fair to claim that different geopolitical temporalities result in different strategic temporalities associated with the management of asylum and migration. Geopolitics became especially relevant to the current refugee situation in Turkey from the initial to the current responses, because as a host country, it belongs to the same region as Syria, Turkey wields disproportionate power vis-à-vis Syria and it has fluctuating interests in terms of the conflict that caused the displacement (Mencütek, 2022). Also, the traces of strategic temporality become more explicit in the case of the Syrian refugee situation, as it is the most populous and the longest refugee-hosting situation that Turkey has so far encountered. Hence, several discursive, legal, and institutional strategies have to be simultaneously mobilized to respond to it.

1.3.4 Hospitality and Cultural Intimacy as Discursive Components of Strategic Temporality

The concepts of hospitality, guesthood and cultural intimacy are helpful in explaining how receiving countries strategically construct the temporality of refugees at a discursive level (Carpi & Şenoğuz, 2019; Rottmann & Kaya, 2021). As Ross Langmead (2016, 171) put it very well:

Hospitality is a strong concept that includes justice-seeking, political action, inclusion around our tables, intercultural friendship, pursuing a hospitable multicultural approach to [religious] life, practical assistance, long-term commitment, learning from those who are different, sensitivity to the power dynamics of ‘welcome’, a willingness to ‘let go’ as well as ‘embrace’, interfaith dialogue and discovering the intertwining of the guest and host roles which is embedded in… theological understandings of God’s activity amongst us.

The role of guesthood in welcoming refugees was extensively discussed in the neighbouring countries of Syria, such as Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey because these countries considered Syrian refugees as “guests” from the very beginning of the mass migration in 2011, and they linked their refugee response to some deep-rooted values such as ‘Turkish hospitality’, ‘Muslim fraternity’, ‘Arab hospitality’ and ‘guesthood’ traditions (Baban et al., 2017; Chatty, 2013; El Abed, 2014; Erdoğan, 2015). However, all of these values underlined the temporality of refugees as guests. Enhancing guesthood discourses with religious credentials, Turkish government leaders consistently compared Turkey’s role in assisting Syrian refugees to that of the Ansar, referring to the Medinans who helped to migrating Muslims, Muhajirun, who were escaping from persecution. Framing Syrian refugees within the discourse of Muhajirun and host communities welcoming them as Ansar elevated public and private efforts to accommodate Syrian refugees from a humanitarian responsibility to a religious and charity-based duty. The Ansar spirit was also visible in Iraq and Lebanon in the first years of the mass migration of Syrians.

There was a similar cultural and theological understanding of refugee hosting in many European countries in 2015–16 (Chemin & Nagel, 2020; Kaya, 2019). Hospitality and ‘welcome culture’ were visible during the so-called Refugee Crisis, which erupted after the images of the dead body of a toddler, Aylan Kurdi, whose family was pushed back to the Aegean shores of Turkey were widely published (Smith, 2015). In both non-EU and EU countries, Quranic, Biblical and theological understandings of guesthood played an important role in host communities (Saunders et al., 2016). For example, in Germany, the leading state in Europe, opened its arms to embrace refugees in need, a religious discourse with strong Biblical connotations was dominant. Religion here plays a ready source for constructing these narratives.

However, the so-called ‘welcome culture’ did not last long either in the neighbouring countries of Syria or in the EU. The so-called welcoming culture and the politics of hospitality with strong religious connotations are subject to a state of temporariness because, anthropologically speaking, the discourse of hospitality assumes that the guest is temporarily welcomed by the host as a gift-giving act (Mauss, 1990). What is taken in return for the gift is the loyalty of the guest. A refugee, or an asylum seeker, is expected to pledge his/her loyalty to the host, and in return, s/he is treated with hospitality for a certain period of time. Once this period is expired, then the state of the guest becomes contested. As expected, when countries are faced with unprecedented numbers of refugees, the moral or religious connotations of hosting are replaced with cold-statistical calculations and restrictive policies and practices. For example, the Ansar spirit has been gradually replaced with a return discourse and open hostility towards Syrians in Turkey, which now seeks to deter new arrivals (Korkut, 2016; Kaya, 2020a; b; c; Şahin Mencütek, 2018).

Cultural intimacy is another fitting concept for understanding the discursive dimension of refugee governance, particularly interactions between migrants and host communities. Cultural intimacy refers to “the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality” (Herzfeld, 2005, 3). Herzfeld’s notion of cultural intimacy does not only refer to ‘the sharing of known and recognizable traits’ with the ones inside, but it also refers to those traits ‘disapproved by powerful outsiders’ (Ibid.). According to Herzfeld, essentialization and reification of the past and culture is not only an ideological element instrumentalized by political institutions and states to control and manipulate the masses but also an indispensable element of social life because it creates the division between “us” and “them” (Herzfeld, 2016, 33). Hence, ordinary individuals also tend to essentialize and reify the past for their use to come to terms with the hardships of everyday life.

In the case of Syrians in Turkey, Arabic-speaking Sunni-Syrians have created comfort zones in various cities of Turkey based on a cultural intimacy with local communities regarding religious, moral, architectural, urban, and sometimes linguistic similarities originating from the common Ottoman past. By asserting that they are culturally and religiously similar and have grown connected to Turkey over time (cultural intimacy), Syrians object to their positioning as temporary and try to emplace themselves in Turkey (Rottmann & Kaya, 2021). However, as will be discussed in Chap. 3 in more detail, culture and religion have become points of contestation between locals and Syrians in Turkey

Despite all these institutional, socio-legal and discursive strategies to manage migration or to make it temporal, refugees -individually and collectively- circumvent challenging situations and claim social and political rights (Ataç et al., 2016). Thus, we need the concept of refugee agency, as discussed below and addressed more fully in Chap. 5.

1.4 Refugee Agency Amidst Strategic Temporality

There have been long efforts to attempt “zooming in on the agency” of migrants (Mainwaring, 2016; Triandafyllidou, 2017). Agency basically means the ability to act. The scope of acting can vary according to the capabilities, aspirations and resources of the migrant on the one hand and external structural factors on the other. An emphasis on agency allows us to see positionalities within this conundrum of individual determinations and structural impediments. Within migration studies, agency is usually understood in terms of migrants’ decision-making strategies about mobility (Bakewell, 2010; Feng et al., 2021) as well as their resistance to structural factors, such as border control restrictions, protection challenges or power hierarchies. A large number of studies also make calls to pay attention to agency in governance through theoretical lenses of governmentality, actor-network and assemblage theory (Bigo, 2002; Pallister-Wilkins, 2015). In contrast to structure-centric theories, assemblage thinking underlines the need to be more sensitive to the complexity of power relations, including the activities of migrants, while still challenging the dichotomy between structure and agency as well as oppression and resistance (Wiertz, 2020).

Immigrants and refugees confront temporality -demonstrating agency – in many ways. As noted, temporary migration represents the predominant form of legal migration patterns (Lee & Piper, 2017) and forced migration is inherently projected as temporary or is accompanied by policy measures seeking to ensure its temporariness. The temporality of migration, both in terms of refugee or voluntary migration, shapes migrant agency and their aspirations about integration, onward migration and return in different ways. When this temporality is imposed by the host state, migrants develop their own understanding of temporariness and seek strategies to cope with it (Kallio et al., 2020). Yet, in situations of strategic temporality, agency is limited by uncertainty and a chronic inability to make long-term plans and be assured of safety, security and autonomy. Still, our research shows that migrants are not passive victims of this situation. They take a wide variety of actions to foster permanent inclusion, actions that clearly show agency.

Besides the concepts introduced above to understand how strategic temporality works in terms of Turkish state responses to Syrian refugees (e.g. governance, multilevelness, the local turn, stratification, cultural intimacy, refugee agency), our book emphasises the institutional, legal and discursive dimensions that build differentiation into policy fields. The following section explains these fields and the links among them.

1.5 Multiple Policy Fields: Reception, Protection and Integration

The policy fields of governance have to be unpacked because our focus is on the protracted refugee situation. Policies are not limited to border management but go beyond it, encompassing reception, protection, and integration. These pillars do not situate in a linear way in terms of time but rather emerge simultaneously.

The first policy field under scrutiny in refugee response is reception. Reception refers to the liminal period between the arrival and application for taking international protection (asylum) on the one hand and the decision about the asylum application on the other. The terms “refugee” and “asylum seekers” are often used interchangeably since refugees in the context of reception governance are usually asylum seekers. After the asylum decision, they leave the reception system and become subject to other policy fields, such as integration. They are still part of the protection system as asylum seekers, refugees, people under subsidiary protection or temporary protection holders. In addition, applicants who were not granted asylum but another title of temporary protection (e.g., the suspension of deportation), applicants who appeal against their decision, or applicants who were rejected and are supposed to leave the country without it being enforced by the public authorities remain subject to reception governance. We approach reception governance as a collaborative endeavour to provide asylum seekers with adequate reception measures which involve public (e.g., asylum authorities) and private (e.g. NGOs) collective actors and operate in a multi-level arena.

The definition and scope of reception in EU legislation can serve as a common point of departure and a heuristic assumption with which to grasp various possible dimensions of reception. For instance, Direction 2013/33/EU points out a number of material conditions of reception, including “housing, food and clothing provided in kind, or as financial allowances or in vouchers, or a combination of the three, and a daily expenses allowance” (Article 2 (g)). The direction also touches upon matters of education (Article 14) and basic health care, which ought to be provided during the period of reception, and formulates criteria for proper accommodation (e.g., an adequate standard of living, protecting vulnerable populations, qualified staff, see Article 18). Even though the time frame of reception is not clearly defined in EU legislation, there is an implicit definition: reception starts as soon as the border of a given state has been crossed and an application for international protection has been made. It ends either with the “effective expulsion” of unsuccessful applicants or with the acceptance of their request for protection. The Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 June 2013 (2013/33/EU) laying down standards for the reception of applicants for international protection specifies that standards for the reception of applicants that suffice to ensure applicants for international protection a dignified standard of living and comparable living conditions in all Member States should be laid down. The Directive leaves a remarkable degree of discretion to define what constitutes a dignified standard of living and how it should be achieved. Though the Directive tries to harmonize the reception regimes of the member states, national reception systems differ significantly in setup and modalities for the provision of reception conditions.

The second policy field addressed in refugee response is protection. Generally speaking, international protection and refugee protection are used interchangeably. The broader definition of protection is defined as “all activities aimed at obtaining full respect for the rights of the individual in accordance with the letter and spirit of the relevant bodies of law, namely human rights law, international humanitarian law and refugee law” (UNHCR, 2011, 7). The 1951 Refugee Convention is the key regulating component of global protection regimes. It offers a binding definition of a refugee: “a person who flees his/her country because of a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” (Article 1); it also establishes common principles such as the principle of non-refoulment, according to which a refugee should not be returned to a country where he or she faces serious threats to his/her life or freedom. The 1967 Protocol of the Convention broadens the Convention’s applicability by removing the geographical and time limits that initially restricted the Convention to persons who became refugees due to events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951 (UNHCR, 2011b). The concept of refugee protection usually refers to international protection, and, despite its wide use, the meaning of protection remains open to various interpretations. According to Puggioni (2016, 1), the lack of clarity regarding protection is often conflated with the concept of assistance; thus, refugee protection tends to refer to any policies regarding refugees. The UNHCR Statute uses the term international protection (UNHCR, 2001, 30) to refer to those who lack protection in their country of citizenship. International protection refers to “situations where the country of origin cannot provide protection, and the international community fills the gap by providing international protection” (Puggioni, 2016, 7).

In general understanding, protection is not only limited to survival and physical security but also to the provision of the full range of rights, including civil and political rights, such as the right to freedom of movement and the right to political participation, and economic, social and cultural rights. The concept of a “protection regime” is an umbrella term for different institutionalised forms of protection, such as international protection regimes and various forms of national protection regimes.

The third policy field is integration. Despite numerous policy programs and scholarly research agendas purporting to study integration, it remains a contested concept without an accepted definition or standard model (Castles et al., 2001; Grzymala-Kazlowska & Phillimore, 2018). The EU defined integration for the first time in 2003 as a “two-way process based on mutual rights and corresponding obligations of legally residing third-country nationals and the host societies” (European Council, 2003). EU integration guidelines¹ were further developed in 2004 and 2011 and largely focus on formal inclusion in legal rights, political participation, labour markets, healthcare, housing and schools (European Council, 2016). Scholars also stress the importance of informal and abstract dimensions of integration, including social bridges, bonds and links (Ager & Strang, 2008) and cultural/religious belonging (Garcés-Mascareñas & Penninx, 2016). Integration is both formal and informal, a quantifiable in−/ex-clusion and an ineffable feeling. When debated in Europe, integration often crystallizes around worries of transgressions of national values. Political leaders may posit culturally homogenous nations, and Europe’s migration history and cultural diversity can be pointedly overlooked (Banulescu-Bogdan & Benton, 2017). Much theorizing on integration revolves around a normative framing of Europe, and new research is needed on integration outside of European borders.

The case of refugee governance in Turkey provides one important opportunity to theorize integration in a different political and social context. Some scholars suggest dispensing with the term integration, arguing that it is a racialized discourse of non-belonging (Schinkel, 2018; Korteweg, 2017), reinforcing “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). The preferred term in Turkey is “social harmony” because of negative experiences with integration discourses for German-Turks. In this book, we explore how the term strategic temporality allows us to think beyond the fraught meanings of integration and link to a wide variety of research areas that matter to scholars and policy-makers, including civic stratification, belonging and inclusion, citizenship studies and research on social cohesion and bonds.

We do not focus only on outcomes and formal measures, nor do we adopt the state-centric perspective of migrants integrating into a homogenous national unit. We join others in examining integration while writing against such approaches. For example, Sophia Hinger and Reinhard Schweitzer (2020) propose the term disintegration to explore a loss of cohesion and barriers to integration, while Veronica Federico and Simone Baglioni (2021) highlight enablers and barriers to labour market integration. The concept of differential inclusion refers to how “inclusion in a sphere, society or realm can involve various degrees of subordination, rule, discrimination, racism, disenfranchisement, exploitation and segmentation (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015, 79-80). Differential inclusion involves the “filtering, selecting and channelling” of migrants as part of migration regimes (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, 165). This book argues that disintegration, integration barriers, and differential inclusion result from implementing strategic temporality. We show how strategic temporality enables us to turn our attention to the state’s governance as a strategy on the one hand and the agentive negotiations of refugees on the local level on the other hand.

1.6 Overview of Literature on Syrians in Turkey

There is an exponentially growing literature on Turkey’s migration and asylum policies, their outcomes and the experiences of asylum seekers and migrants; particularly, there are many studies focusing on Syrians in Turkey. We selectively highlight some of these studies that enable us to develop our main analytical starting point of strategic temporality and the key concepts presented above, namely complex governance, multilevelness, local turn, liminality, uncertainty, differential inclusion and refugee agency.

Turkey holds the complex status of being a country of emigration, immigration and transit for mixed migration flows due to its geographical position and socio-economic and political dynamics. These positions relationally shape its emigration, immigration, diaspora and return policies with various actors holding diverging interests and interactions, calling to mind the model of multilevel governance with high complexity (Sirkeci et al., 2015a; Sirkeci & Pusch, 2016). Law is an inevitable component of Turkish migration management (Sirkeci et al., 2015b). The politics of migration have historical roots in the nation-building process of the country and, accordingly, its citizenship regime (İçduygu et al., 2008; İçduygu & Aksel, 2013; İçduygu & Kirişci, 2009; Erdoğan & Kaya, 2015). EU-Turkey relations have also strongly influenced migration policies since the 1990s.

Studies focusing on the governance of Syrian refugees in Turkey fall under multiple research strands. The first strand of research describes the challenges in managing Syrian migration by adopting the terms uncertainty, precarity and being in limbo. Kristen Sarah Biehl (2015) explains the experiences of Syrian refugees in Turkey with the concept of “protracted uncertainty” by defining it as the situation of “indefinite waiting, limited knowledge, and unpredictable legal status, which is a central element of the experience of being an asylum seeker in Turkey.” Precarity, particularly poor living conditions, problems in access to public services, temporary status and highly selective integration policies that put Syrians in limbo, are reported in many studies on Syrian refugees in Turkey (Akçapar & Simsek, 2018; Aras & Duman, 2019; Baban et al., 2017; Canefe, 2016; Eder & Özkul, 2016; Nimer & Rottmann, 2021a; b). Seçil Ertorer (2021) defines all of these conditions as multidimensional precarity because they start with the migration journey and continually grow during the settlement experiences of registration, finding housing, accessing social services, and working. Existing studies almost all agree that the temporary protection regime of Turkey causes legal precarity and social limbo with insufficient rights and without upholding international legal agreements and forming rights-based legal protection (Çelik & White, 2021; Ineli-Ciger, 2015; Rygiel et al., 2016). Meltem Ineli-Ciger argues that if the return of temporarily protected groups is clarified better in the law, “it is possible for the Turkish temporary protection regime to become a more open, credible, and viable temporary protection system that is in accordance with Turkey’s international obligations and the UNHCR Guidelines on Temporary Protection” (Ineli-Ciger, 2015, 28).

Some studies use governance or regime terminology to discuss the characteristics of Turkey’s policies and actors addressing Syrian refugee arrivals. It has been argued that the “multi-layered migration regime” in Turkey creates “legal precarization” for refugees (Genç et al., 2018), and “technocratic migration governance” generates “differentiated legal statuses” (Üstübici, 2019). A few studies focus on changes over time in Turkey’s refugee governance, by describing Turkey’s initial response pattern as ad hoc while the protracted response pattern becomes regulative and restrictive or by conducting detailed periodiations (Gökalp-Aras & Şahin Mencütek, 2015). Some studies in the governance realm highlight governance actors’ roles and interactions (Şahin Mencütek 2021a; Şahin Mencütek et al. 2021). The role of civil society in accommodating refugees and their relations with the state and other state actors like municipalities have frequently been the subject of study (Aras & Duman, 2019; Danış & Nazlı, 2018; Şahin Mencütek, 2021a).

Less has been written about the role of international organizations -UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM)‘s- in Turkey’s migration management compared to the EU’s role. Their roles usually show path dependency. Thus, pre-2011 analysis about these organizations’ activities in Turkey may provide insights into their roles, too. Shoshana Fine’s research (2017) shows how the IOM brings migration management knowledge and practices to local sites through technical expertise and social learning. Stephan Scheel and Philipp Ratfisch (2014) demonstrate how UNHCR actively participates in rendering population in Turkey governable and managing through certain conceptualizations, particularly differentiating between refugees and illegal migrants, due to its main role in the refugee status determination process until 2018. Thus, as elsewhere, UNHCR contributed to reinstating the global restrictive refugee protection discourse and the emerging migration management paradigm at the national level. Studies agree that both organizations worked closely with the migration bureaucracy in Turkey, which culminated in trust and confidence and enabled the agencies to take subsidiary roles providing training and expertise to national officers. Both IOM and UNHCR avoid any criticism of the government and use a discourse of partnership and collaboration. Both were actively involved in drafting Turkey’s first asylum legislation that envisioned temporary protection for mass arrivals and maintained geographical limitations over the Geneva Convention (Fine, 2017; Kirişci, 2012; Scheel & Philipp, 2014). As planned in the preparation of this legislation, refugee status determination was handed over to Turkish national agencies in 2018 (Nalule & Ozkul, 2020).

Besides actors and interactions, modes of migration governance are driven by multiple vested interests and ambiguous discourses that have historical roots. Şule Can (2019) argues that all types of displacement in Turkey are intertwined with identity, politics, and state negotiations. Fulya Memişoğlu and Aslı Ilgıt rightly point out that the Syrian refugee issue in Turkey is governed by “multifaceted challenges, diverse players and ambiguous policies” (2017, 317). Linking refugee policies with labour policies from a historical perspective, Souad Osserian shows that the “temporariness of Syrian refugees in the region, while reinforced by various (non) state actors and produced differently based on the history and asylum framework of nation-states in the region, aims primarily at incorporating Syrian refugees into local economies as surplus labour” (2020, 1).

A growing number of studies address discourses about hosting Syrian refugees that have been disseminated by the governing party (Demirtaş-Bagdonas, 2014; Koca, 2016; Polat, 2018). Immigration policy is situated inside the more significant concerns of domestic, bilateral, regional, and international politics on the one side and everyday politics on the other. These discourses are not independent of the politics of migration with domestic and foreign policy dimensions often intertwined (Gökalp-Aras, 2019; Şahin Mencütek 2021b; Tsourapas, 2019). The issue of moral responsibility and humanitarianism in the discourse are often selectively and pragmatically presented in Turkish refugee governance (Korkut, 2016). These discourses are often populist (Yanaşmayan et al., 2019). Deniz Sert and Didem Danış (2021) argue that the state discourse on Syrians in the Turkish media has been deliberately avoided so as to use crisis framing, unlike in European examples. They explain this as a sign of implicit silencing via media control and a policy to manage public reactions to the mass arrival of refugees. In addition, despite common humanitarian discourses and liberal policies, control and containment have been essential to the governance of Syrian refugees in Turkey, especially concerning societal/public security concerns (Gökalp-Aras, 2020; Koca, 2016). Thus, the securitization process transforms Syrian refugees from guests to enemies. In addition to the emphasis on general discourses, some studies examine discursive changes in certain sensitive policy areas like repatriation (İçduygu & Nimer, 2020; Şahin Mencütek, 2021b), citizenship (Akçapar & Simsek, 2018) and employment (Koca, 2016).

The salience of the local turn as a research agenda has been increasingly observable in a growing number of studies about Syrians. One research strand in this regard focuses on the encounters at local levels through in-depth anthropological studies. Theoretically, some studies benefit from the insights of the border and borderland studies that began to emerge in the 1990s in Turkish scholarship that centres around border economies, forms of border administration and the maintenance of border security from the lenses of anthropology (Aras, 2020; Nimer & Rottmann, 2021a; b). The arrival of Syrians brought a fresh outlook and a more ethnographic view into this research because navigations and negotiations of both refugees and hosts are more traceable in those studies of Syrian refugee experiences in a town or city, particularly those on the Turkish-Syrian border like Kilis, Antakya and Gaziantep at the Syrian border (Balamir-Coskun & Nielsen, 2018; Can, 2019; Dağtaş, 2017; Şenoğuz, 2018). Concepts like encounters, guesthood and hospitality are widely discussed in these studies looking at displaced people and receiving host community experiences. For example, drawing from the case of Hatay province, Seçil Dağtaş argues that “the sudden transformation of Syrians from familial misafirs to governmental misafirs in the early days of the Syrian conflict ruptured the hierarchical domains of reciprocity that have historically shaped the cross-border relations between these communities” (2017, 661).

Another strand of research looks at the experiences of non-Syrian asylum seekers or transit migrants in urban spaces not located at the Turkey-Syria border. These urban localities serve as transit and temporary sites, and they are subject to bordering practices (Bulut & Şahin, 2019; Erensu & Kaşli, 2016; Öner et al., 2020). Also, recent studies show how relationships are built among places, refugees, and locals in specific neighbourhoods such as Basmane in Izmir to produce differential pathways for adaptation and experiences of precarity (Öner et al., 2020). These studies illustrate how power, inclusion/exclusion and hierarchy emerge in encounters, while the nation-state bordering continuously impacts social stratification and change under this precarity and temporality.

Another research strand about the local turn in urban areas focuses on the municipal authorities’ role in responding to the Syrian refugee situation (Betts et al., 2020; Erdoğan, 2017b; Genç, 2018; Genç & Özdemirkıran Embel, 2019; Kale & Erdoğan, 2019; Lowndes & Polat, 2020; Kaya, 2020a, b, c). One prominent study by Lowndes and Polat (2020) focuses on three districts in Istanbul to find out the “distinctive local narratives, some of which consolidated the national agenda of ‘hospitality’ while others focused on equal rights and integration” (1). They argue that “municipal narratives reflected particular local contexts, selectively mobilizing deeper governing traditions. Local interpretations were enacted as part of specific approaches to refugee service delivery. Working with local NGOs, municipalities accessed international funds, despite the national government’s vociferous critique of EU refugee policy. Even in an increasingly authoritarian setting, refugee policy was being constituted through multiple and contingent processes of local government interpretation” (1).

Within this complexity of governance, marked by uncertainty, refugees, who encounter locals and state authorities, have to negotiate urban spaces and their own refugee status, challenging, resisting and sometimes confirming ethnic, linguistic, or sectarian boundaries (Can, 2019; Rottmann et al., 2020; Rottmann & Kaya, 2021). Biehl (2015) argues that uncertainty serves to demobilize, contain, and criminalize asylum seekers through the production of protracted uncertainty. It is in a way normalized as a necessity of bureaucracy as well as security. For non-Syrian asylum seekers, the situation is not less precarious or certain. A recent study (Loyd et al., 2018) refers to the experiences of non-Syrian asylum seekers in Turkey as “protracted waiting” because asylum seekers wait for long periods for refugee status determination interviews and if approved, for long periods before resettlement to third countries. Sima Shakhsari (2014) shows that Iranian queer and trans refugees in Turkey are “suspended in an in-between zone of recognition where rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill.” This precarity is not specific to the current times, and it has historical roots. As Ayse Parla (2019, 1) argues based on the case of Bulgarian Turkish immigrants, “the tensions between ethnic privilege and economic vulnerability urge us to rethink “the limits of migrant belonging among those for whom it is intimated and promised—but never guaranteed.”

Besides these studies, there is a rise in studies addressing sub-topics like integration, protection or reception of Syrian refugees. A growing number of studies in Turkish and English focus on various aspects of integration or ‘social cohesion’ and ‘social harmony’. They identify barriers and supporters in integration (Akar & Erdoğdu, 2019; Erdoğan, 2017a; Şimşek, 2019), while some others focus on specific aspects, such as employment ​and class (Belanger & Saracoglu, 2020; Şimşek, 2020; Nimer & Rottmann, 2021a; b); citizenship (Akçapar & Simsek, 2018; Baban et al., 2017); education and language acquisition (Rottmann & Nimer, 2020), gender (Janas & Rottmann, 2021; Kıvılcım, 2017; Özden & Ramadan, 2019; Rottmann & Nimer, 2021; Sezingalp Ozcetin & Rottmann, 2022). There are a large number of studies addressing the vulnerability and protection challenges encountered by Syrians (Cuevas et al., 2019; Ineli-Ciger, 2015; Kıvılcım, 2017) and irregular migrants (Gökalp-Aras & Şahin, 2018; Kaytaz, 2021; Soykan, 2017), but less on reception (Üstübici, 2020).

1.7 Data Collection and Research Methodology

The methodological approach used in this book is that of the qualitative in-depth case study. The research benefits from both primary and secondary data sources, which were analysed inductively and thematically via an interpretative and narrative approach (Gehman et al., 2018; Marshall & Rossman, 2016). The research mainly reflects primary research findings based on field research conducted in İstanbul, İzmir, Şanlıurfa and Ankara in 2018,² as well as an extensive analysis of secondary data sources, including legal documents, reports published by inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) and NGOs, scholarly analyses of policy measures, statistics, and official documents and statements.

The field research in four cities led to the conducting of 84 semi-structured meso-level interviews (İstanbul/ 17, İzmir/29, Şanlıurfa/ 29 and Ankara/4), observations and focus groups. Meso-level stakeholders who were interviewed include key actors operating at the central state level such as officers serving at the Directorate General of Migration Management (DGMM) in Ankara and officers assigned to provinces such as branches of ministries, directorates and Red Crescent. We also approached representatives of local governments, including migration-relevant units at municipalities, city councils and mukhtars of neighbourhoods, to conduct interviews. We put specific attention to collecting the insights of IO representatives such as experts working for IOM and UNHCR, Turkey. In addition to these individuals, interviews were conducted with the directors, experts and social workers working for international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), NGOs, refugee organisations, and lawyers and bar associations. We also met with scholars and migration researchers a number of times to discuss our initial findings and the challenges in collecting data.

Meso-level interview guidelines include semi-structured questions which are shaped according to the stakeholders. A set of questions focused on the general assessment of the county’s polices and experiences in the fields which fall under the expertise of interviewed organization (border management, reception, health, education, labor market, right-based advocacy civic participation etc.). They are also asked about their ideas about the challenges encountered by refugees and potential pathways for the improvement of the national and regional refugee regime. Due to the focus of the study on governance, some questions also address to learn about the legal and institutional challenges in the implementation stages as well as the power relations among multiple actors. Stakeholders are also asked about the characteristics of their organization such as the number of staff, the year of establishment, the source of funding, expertise and the fields in which they get actively involved in refugee governance (e.g. monitoring, participating in consultative bodies, advocacy, daily support to refugees, lobbying)

The selection of sites for interviews and participant observation is driven by multiple considerations so as to account for within-country variations as much as possible. İstanbul was chosen because it has the largest Syrian population in Turkey, with 552,080 Syrians as of 7 November 2019 when the fieldwork was conducted (DGMM, 2019). Şanlıurfa hosts the third largest Syrian population in Turkey, with 429,888 as of 7 November 2019, which means 24% of the province’s total population (1,985,753) lives there (Ibid.). In Şanlıurfa, we extended our fieldwork to two towns, namely Ceylanpınar and Siverek to trace possible variations on the basis of the dominant ethnicity, Arabic and Kurdish, of the hosting community. We chose Izmir because it is the Aegean Sea’s main transit hub and serves as an exit point for those migrants leaving Turkey using irregular pathways. İzmir became a place of intense migratory movement in the summer of 2015. Numbers in Izmir were also impacted by the fact that readmissions from the Greek Islands as a part of the EU-Turkey Statement (2016) were readmitted by Turkey through this city. As of 7 November 2019, there are 146,889 registered Syrians under temporary protection in Izmir (DGMM, 2019). İzmir’s town of Dikili was also visited to observe on-the-ground concerns around border crossings. The selection of Ankara is guided by a desire to understand the centralist governance of protection, as it does not have a high migrant and/or refugee population. Only meso-level interviews were carried out there since it hosts international, European and national policy-making and implementing institutions and their main headquarters or centres, such as the EU Delegation to Turkey and a high-level of national institutions, such as related ministries and the DGMM. In addition, Ankara hosts not only IGOs, but also important international as well as national NGOs. None of the selected cities mentioned above is a “satellite city” (according to Turkish asylum regulations) where the beneficiaries of international protection are allowed to reside, except those having specific conditions such as health conditions.

In addition to the meso-level, in total 103 interviews were conducted with Syrian refugees in İzmir (43), İstanbul (40) and Şanlıurfa (20). Interviewee sampling was designed to approach representativeness in terms of the districts where migrants were living in, the period of arrival, gender, age, vulnerabilities and variations in legal status. The gender ratio of the interviewees was approximately equal, and the ratio between early (2011–14) and later arrivals (2015–18) was also equal. The age ratio was as follows: 18–24, 40%; 27–50, 40%; and 50 +, 20%, reflecting the relative proportions of Syrians of respective age groups in Turkey. In terms of education, roughly one-third of our sample was illiterate or had only elementary or lower secondary school education, one-third had higher secondary level education, and one-third did not report their educational level. With regards to employment in the home country, approximately one-third of our sample never worked (34%), while one-fourth (24%) were specialists (lawyers, doctors, bookkeepers, lecturers, data specialists, teachers, translators) or managers, supervisors or directors. The remaining were unskilled or skilled workers or did not report their employment history. Some 84% of our interviewees were married or engaged, with the remainder divided nearly equally between single people and those who were widowed or divorced.

Interviews with refugees were conducted by following the semi-structured micro-level interview questionnaire and detailed guideline about the ethical and self-care issues in the research field. The questionnaire began with standard questions (e.g. age, marital status, year of displacement(s), spoken languages). Then, they were asked about their lives in Syria, including the reason of fleeing. The second set of questions focused on their experiences in crossing the borders, while the third emphasized how they experienced the legal procedures, registration and asylum process upon arrival to Turkey. Then refugees were asked about their general encounters in Turkey, particularly their reception by the host and refugee community. Other sets of questions were more related to the integration by questioning the conditions of housing, employment, language and health.

These interviews were carried out by respecting the ethical principles agreed upon by the RESPOND consortium (RESPOND, 2018)³ and approved by the Swedish Research Institute in İstanbul, İstanbul Bilgi University and Özyegin University. Interviews were conducted in Turkish, English, Arabic and Kurdish with the assistance of translators if needed. Data was collected after taking voluntary, explicit and well-informed consent from interviewees. Only data that is essential for specific research aims were collected, and personal data was avoided. Principles of anonymity, confidentiality and privacy were fully respected during data gathering, analysing and reporting results.

Moreover, in the period 2011–2020, each author participated in several interconnected studies on migration to, from and through Turkey, which are pertinent to the discussions in this book. The authors also attended several workshops, meetings, and round-tables organised by stakeholders, such as ministries, directorates, UN agencies, EU institutions, municipalities, service providers, and NGOs. The authors gained valuable knowledge through participation at various specialised conferences and workshops on Syrian refugees. In sum, this book’s discussion is based on extensive desk studies, interviews, analysis of policy documents, and news about various dimensions of Turkey’s response to Syrian mass migration, combined with the invaluable experiences of the authors accumulated from their studies and encounters.

The collected data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The selected software, the Nvivo12 Plus Programme, allowed us to code the collected material systematically. We used both a deductive and inductive approach in creating our coding frame for analysis. The collected data allowed for descriptive, explanatory and causal analyses of governance in Turkey. Legal and policy analyses were used to better understand the maintenance of strategic temporality by policymakers. Meso-level interview analyses helped to explain how various stakeholders interpret and implement this strategic temporality in a given dynamic context and how their interventions create certain outcomes via the everyday encounters of refugees with state and non-state actors. Micro-level interview analyses enable us to see how refugees navigate this strategic temporality and how they claim agency within it. Also, both meso and micro-level interview analysis and discursive analysis display the relevance of the host community context and changes over time. Hence, we attempt to trace signs of discursive volatility in the given period and both policy implementers’ and refugees’ efforts to tackle it.

1.8 Mapping of the Book

Turkey’s response to Syrian mass migration in 2011–2021 is the central focus of this book. The book explains this response from the vantage point of the concept of strategic temporality, as explained at the beginning of this introduction chapter. Since this chapter has already engaged with the existing literature, the following chapters directly start discussing case-specificities. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the governance context. It discusses the main features of legislative, institutional, political, and discursive dimensions. It underlines the asylum regime’s dual and stratified structure in the legislative dimension and multi-levelness at the institutional dimension. It also shows how legislation and institutions play out in a highly charged domestic and international political context. To ease the comprehension of political context, the chapter makes a periodization for Turkey’s involvement in the Syrian conflict generating refugees and Turkey’s relation with the EU, which influences migration policies. Chapter 3 describes reception. Keeping strategic temporary as an umbrella framework, the chapter shows the nuances on the ground by focusing on the local turn and the politics of subsidiarity. The chapter elaborates further on the discursive dimension by linking it with cultural intimacy and guesthood rhetorics. Doing this shows how refugees and local communities interpret this rhetoric and how they transform it in the course of time. Chapter 4 examines international protection. It investigates how Turkey interprets, narrates and implements its obligations towards international and temporary protection with an emphasis on recent migration movements. It highlights gaps between policy and practice in the protection field. Furthermore, it examines the perceptions, experiences and strategies of meso-level actors involved in international and temporary protection while also identifying the coping strategies and perceptions of individuals who go through the asylum system at the micro-level. An emphasis on both meso and micro-level actors is of the utmost importance for unpacking how different actors within the asylum system navigate, internalise and/or resist the asylum system’s rationalisations. The chapter links political narratives to surrounding experiences and practices.

Chapter 5 focuses on integration, and addresses how local actors negotiate spaces to act in support of integration and how migrants respond to their situation of non-belonging and permanent liminality. It shows the ways in which local-level actors and migrants more or less skilfully navigate strategic temporality and demonstrate significant agency to forge partial integration. The conclusion, Chap. 6, summarizes the main findings and provides some insights into the current situation of Syrians and the refugee regime. It also briefly touches on the possible response of the Turkish government to Afghan migration as of fall 2021.