Spacing Asylum: Orders of Protection in a Turkish City

Abstract

There has been an increasing tendency within the global refugee regime to contain, slow down and filter refugees in their regions of origin since 1990s. This has effectively rendered political membership inaccessible for the majority of the world's refugees. The resultant need to manage this population has brought together a variety of state and non-state actors with different problematizations of refugee survival. Situated at the edge of Europe as the largest refugee hosting country today, Turkey constitutes an important site where the effects of this dual objective to simultaneously control and care for refugees can be observed. Based on qualitative fieldwork in a Turkish city where refugees are compulsorily dispersed, I trace (1) international mechanisms of regulating refugee mobility and access to protection; (2) state policies of refugee reception and their rationales; (3) local modalities of refugee reception including the social legitimacy accorded to different refugee groups and the related practices of inclusion and exclusion; and (4) refugee agency in coping with the consequent manifestation of only a constrained and differential access to protection. I argue that at the intersection of control and care multiple and conflicting hierarchies of refugees emerge and undercut each other, rendering Turkey a grey zone of asylum in which refugees are positioned between recuperation and rejection.