Refugee Encounters at the Turkish-Syrian Border

Antakya at the Crossroads

Şule Can

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138393400
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429686849
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Turkish-Syrian borderlands host almost half of the Syrian refugees, with an estimated 1.5 million people arriving in the area following the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. This book investigates the ongoing negotiations of ethnicity, religion and state at the border, as refugees struggle to settle and to navigate their encounters with the Turkish state and with different sectarian groups.

In particular, the book explores the situation in Antakya, the site of the ancient city of Antioch, the "cradle of civilizations", and now populated by diverse populations of Arab Alawites, Christians and Sunni-Turks. The book demonstrates that urban refugee encounters at the margins of the state reveal larger concerns that encompass state practices and regional politics. Overall, the book shows how and why displacement in the Middle East is intertwined with negotiations of identity, politics and state. Faced with an environment of everyday oppression, refugees negotiate their own urban space and "refugee" status, challenging, resisting and sometimes confirming sectarian boundaries.

This book's detailed analysis will be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, historians, and Middle Eastern studies scholars who are working on questions of displacement, cultural boundaries and the politics of civil war in border regions.

1 Introduction

War, displacement and encounters at the border

In reality, the trees don’t die standing. And Remy does not find his mother after all the patient waiting.

In reality, Cinderella does not accidentally drop her slippers, but she does it intentionally. Snow White did not die of a poisoned apple, and she was not satisfied with just seven dwarfs. Qays did not die but continued his life alone without Layla. Our tales are true, but the stories are assumed.

Just like your false reality that you, my friend, write so eloquently on your page with utter innocence.

~ Rania¹

Rania, a Syrian refugee in Antakya,² (Hatay) shared this quote with me during a conversation on the “reality of refugees.” Rania’s words and the struggle they represent contributed to my own transformative experience in the course of my fieldwork—what the anthropologist Berdahl calls a “fieldwork turning point narrative” (1999:16). This transformative experience of mine taught me both the everyday violence embedded in legal and gendered contexts and the poetics of Rania’s struggle, which were a means of restoring dignity against oppression. However, Rania’s statement addresses a more important point than my own self-reflexive academic turning point. Her representation of refugees intervenes in the ways anthropologists engage with refugee lives, displacement, and oppression. When Rania told me the metaphor of tales above, there was one clear message: there is no such thing for us, anthropologists as grasping the reality of refugee because the stories, as Rania points out are always assumed, which emphasizes the “unknown” that is often difficult to acknowledge in anthropological research. In other words, the stories of refugees as victimized subjects of suffering and violence implicate vulnerabilities that scholars assume and are eager to express as opposed to global forces, histories, and powers that are complicit in the process of creating inequality and violence. But then the question remains: what is it that we try to understand when we work with refugees? In other words, what are the most productive ways of contributing migration studies without isolating “refugee stories” from other relational contexts in today’s global political climate? The answer constitutes the basis of this book. This book attempts to understand the intertwined relationships and complexities among the state’s migration policies, refugees, and border populations negotiating border policies, cultural boundaries, and labor in a transition zone. Thus, I focus on refugee lives in a relational context—which is mutual constitution of refugee lives and reproduction of ethno-religious boundaries—by looking at “urban encounters” at the state margins (Das and Poole 2004), namely the border province of Antakya (Hatay), known to the Western audience as the biblical town of ancient Antioch. Antakya, which was annexed from Syria by Turkey in 1939, is renowned as one of the few cosmopolitan cities left in Turkish Anatolia today and its cultural diversity is often advertised by the Turkish state to draw the world’s attention to the Turkish model of interfaith dialogue (Dağtaş 2012). This celebration of ethnic urban cohabitation, and Antakya as a “home” of cultural difference and a cradle of “civilizations” (Doğruel 2005; Türk 2009), prevented peaceful antagonisms from becoming ethno-religious conflicts before the Syrian civil war. However, today, the influx of the Syrian refugees, Turkish government’s border policies, and sectarian tensions have changed the political landscape and everyday life in Antakya. In this book, I seek to demonstrate the ways in which shifting ethno-religious boundaries and negotiations of state and labor have become visible through an ethnographic account of encounters between refugees and local residents of Antakya (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Map of Antakya (Hatay) in Turkey.

An anthropological focus on refugees in isolation from places, people, and states’ border regimes runs the risk of overlooking other relevant aspects, such as spatial, social, and political boundaries with respect to state effects. Malkki (1995) critiques scholarly work on refugees that locates the problem not in the violence refugees flee (or in the violence they encounter when they arrive elsewhere), but in refugees themselves. She suggests that the impulse of locating problems within the figure of the refugee coincides with another tendency, that which universalizes the refugee in the “refugee experience.” Malkki’s criticism demonstrates that one of anthropology’s main contributions to the study of refugees has been to question the homogeneity of refugees. This book builds on Malkki’s legacy by suggesting that the anthropology of refugees analyzes the relational aspects of different levels of inquiry, such as refugees who are in constant negotiation of identity with the places, states, ideologies, migration regimes, and people they encounter as political subjects. The international migration regime’s part in local suffering is visible in “spaces of interactions,” what Pratt (1991) calls “contact zones,”³ within the realm of the everyday. In this sense, the anthropological understanding of everyday life in relation to larger political and international context contributes to refugee studies that go beyond an individual “refugee experience” paradigm as proposed in recent ethnographies which investigated borders, hospitality (Dağtaş 2017; Zaman 2016), solidarity (Rozakou 2012), institutional processes, and humanitarian issues (Carpi 2014; Danış and Nazlı 2018). Like this scholarship, this book moves beyond refugee-host relations by exploring how seemingly mundane everyday activities in border cities are fraught with intense historical and political meaning and contingent upon multiple actors, such as the state, border policies, and border populations. It investigates ethno-religious conflict and the shift in the political landscape of Antakya, Turkey’s southernmost border with Syria, in response to three forces: the Syrian conflict, the Turkish state’s Syria and migration policies, and the influx of the Syrian refugees in Turkey.

With respect to these forces and local responses to them, I present three main arguments in this book. First, although Turkey accepted millions of refugees and the international community appreciated its generous approach, I argue that Turkey’s border regime and Syria policy make Syrian refugees almost completely dependent on regional negotiations of survival, mobility, and labor through the medium of ethnic and religious identities and existing kinship relations.⁴ This dependency encroaches refugees’ labor rights by creating “temporary” labor force and makes Syrian refugees vulnerable to oppression. They are also forced to negotiate “trust” and political affiliation in order to find a job and to be mobile in the city. Second, the government’s sectarian approach to border populations and to the Syrian civil war creates local insecurities, as a result of which local ethno-religious groups, such as Alawites, are compelled to “protect” themselves by reinforcing religious boundaries and politicizing sectarian identities. Turkey’s Syria policies and arbitrary border regime increase divisions not only with refugees, but also among local ethno-religious groups themselves. Finally, Turkish government’s inability to provide for refugees and its oppressive domestic politics render ethno-religious identities the only viable markers for belonging and political claims. In other words, there is no other identity that allows political claims such as citizenship, gender, or economic class in the border region. Therefore, ethno-religious boundaries and “politicized” Arab-Alawite identity have been re-produced. The politicization of ethno-religious identities is analyzed through an understanding of the rise of identity politics in the political realm. These arguments are viewed through an examination of Syrianness⁵, an instrumental notion to understand how difference and opposition are embodied in a multicultural context as Syrianness manifests in Antakya’s public spaces during the war and under the shadow of Turkey’s border regime. They are also viewed through encounters of the political and encounters in everyday life context. Through encounter approaches, the book analyzes Syrian refugees’ and city residents’ confrontations with the state, with each other, and within themselves. In this sense, it shows how ethno-religious identities and politics are embedded in the everyday negotiations of Syrian refugees and local communities, especially Arab Alawites.

The transformation of border cities after the Syrian crisis led to ethnic, religious, and sectarian tensions, particularly in multicultural border regions, due to the exploitation of sectarianism by regional powers and the Islamist leanings of the Syrian opposition. This book focuses on one such region of conflict, the Turkish-Syrian borderlands, where a drastic change in demographics and socio-economic conditions is most notable. Antakya is particularly significant, since it is composed of a unique demographic, as well as historical and political factors, which facilitate assessment of the rapid shifts that have taken place in this border city after the crisis. Shifting dynamics in the city, like fear of violence, jihadist militants, and increasing economic restraints, crystallize ethno-religious boundaries in Antakya. Therefore, an analysis of everyday practices, such as employment, housing, and mobility in the city, and the revival of identity-based political activities, provide useful insights into the interplay between the state, ethno-religious identity, and refuge. This demonstrates how everyday relations and activities (De Certeau 1984) indicate the local and refugee responses to the state’s migration policies. Analyzing refugees’ and residents’ identity negotiations and encounters with the state and with each other, I seek to go beyond constructing the refugee as an externally imposed category, rather, viewing the refugee as a participant in a variety of social and political interactions among different groups in a “translocal” (Moore 2005) politics of place. Scholars of migration and the Middle East have increasingly worked on Syrian immigration to Syria’s neighboring countries including Turkey (Özden 2013; Şenoğuz 2017) and critically engaged in the debates over the rhetoric of “hospitality” (Dağtaş 2017). An accumulating set of studies have explored the integration of Syrian refugees into Turkish society and their social rights (Utku et al. 2017; Yıldız and Uzgören 2016) and state responses to mass refugee flows (Şahin Mencütek 2019). My book addresses a broad question of what happens to ethnic and religious identities when the state fails in its border regime and in governance of vast migrant flows and how border people and refugees respond to it. More specifically, I pose the questions: what is the relationship between Turkey’s foreign and migration policy and cultural and political boundaries? How have the Syrian war and Turkish state practices transformed ethno-religious boundaries and political identity in urban peripheries? How do settled residents and recent refugees negotiate their identities, everyday labor relations, and the state in their encounters in Antakya? This book is about the study of continuity as much as it is about change. It looks at the transformation of a border city and ethno-religious boundaries since 2011 and it also delves into the processes of nationalization and state formation to understand how the making of international borders is intertwined with the current border policies and tensions.

Migration scholars have mostly focused on Syrian refugees, humanitarianism, and border control (Fernando and Giordano 2016; Rodineliussen 2016) as the main research areas since 2011. Some of them embraced a historical and critical approach to refugee “crisis” (Chatty 2017; Saraçoğlu and Belanger 2019) and the Islamic notion of neighborhood in sedentarist world (Zaman 2016). For anthropologists, understanding the plight of the refugees has been the central theme, as opposed to understanding the political polarizations and inter- and intra-communal confrontations that the Syrian uprising (re)created. This study looks at Syrian refugees and their concerns within a broader political context that shapes and is shaped by ethno-religious identities and the ways in which they operate in social sphere.

In this introductory chapter, I present the Syrian civil war as it is seen from the Turkish-Syrian borderlands by focusing on the emergence of jihadist groups and their regional spillover and by underscoring the perception of the Syrian conflict in Antakya. Second, I explore Turkey’s migration and demographic policies. Lastly, after discussing the theoretical framework of encounters and borders, the chapter ends with a section on methodology by explaining field sites, strategies, and the application of reflexive anthropology.

The Syrian civil war at the border

The Syrian conflict began with a wave of pro-democracy demonstrations in early March 2011 in the southern city of Deraa. The arrest of teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall and the Syrian regime’s violent repression of such protest actions triggered a nationwide demand for President Assad’s resignation. After the deaths of many protestors, the uprising turned into an armed conflict. Worldwide support saw the uprising as an extension of the Arab Spring. The Syrian opposition called the unrest the “Syrian revolution,” before political upheaval erupted into civil war in late 2012. The opposition in Syria consisted different groups mostly human rights groups (Landis and Pace 2007) before 2011. When protests started in Syria, their implications on a global level were hardly foreseen, nor was the dissent predicted to last more than five years.

The sectarian dimensions of the war added another complication to political violence in Syria, a country of great diversity. Today, about 65% of Syrians are Arab Sunnis. Arab Alawites make up 10%–12% of the population. Kurds make up to 12.5% of the total population.⁶ Arab Christians, mostly Orthodox and Eastern Catholic, as well as those of Assyrian, Chaldean, and Armenian background, constitute 10% of the population (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami 2016:2). Jihadist groups targeting ethnic and religious minorities and the Syrian regime’s manipulation of minorities’ existential fear of the Sunni majority exacerbated tensions between different ethno-religious groups.

Indeed, the Assad family is affiliated with the Alawite sect, although to what extent the family has adhered to an Alawite identity is a matter of controversy among Alawites. For Alawites, political upheaval and the participation of a majority of Sunni Muslims in the uprising have created a complex dimension to the emerging conflict, as well as a historic opportunity for the sect to establish long-term security and integration goals in a new political system of a pluralist state (Goldsmith 2015:169). For the Sunni majority, the uprising was seen as an opportunity to challenge Assad’s rule and to critique economic inequality in Syria. The Sunni majority’s uneasiness stemmed from political oppression and socio-economic inequality, reflected by an extremely impoverished rural and (mostly) Islamist population, which brought up questions about the role of Islam in Syria and in the uprising (Pierret 2013). Hence, in less than two years, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Note on language
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: war, displacement and encounters at the border
• 2 Fragile diversities: Antakya (Hatay) as a border city
• 3 Refugee encounters: border regime and Syrianness
• 4 Urban encounters: negotiating state, identity and labor
• 5 Encounters of the political: cultural revival after 2011
• 6 Conclusion
• Index