Göçmen Kadınlar ve Devletsiz Neslin Çocukları: Hak Mahrumiyetinden Yoksulluğa

Abstract

The world’s ongoing refugee crises unveils one of the huge but hidden problem of statelessness that under Syrian domestic law the right to pass citizenship on to children is granted to only men. Although The UN convention obliges the member governments to confer nationality to any child who is born in their territory, only a few countries have intended to implement the principle properly, partly due to the fact than Syrian refugee women cannot even register their children as Syrian nationals without a Syrian father who had most probably died during the civil war. Thus Syrian children as a coming generation scattered all over the world have long been left stateless. They are not only deprived of their own nationality, but also of the nationality of any country in which they are born. Refugee mothers are generally unaware that their children with no legal citizenship will be unable to be legally employed, to own property or even go to school. In other words, refugee mothers are unaware how their rightlessness, by virtue of being woman, will lead their children to marginalization and thus utmost poverty. In this paper, I will propose a philosophical approach to how the social problem of poverty is acutely related to the political one, especially to the politics of right in this case. In order to do this, I first evoke one of the most important contemporary political theorists Hannah Arendt’s analysis of paradoxical nature of human rights and the resulting conception of naked human being, which utterly leads to statelessness. After this, I articulate Arendt’s rigorous distinction between ‘the social’ and ‘the political’, where the former’s problems (i.e., poverty) occupy the latter in modern mentality. Having accepted that Arendt’s distinction is indeed more than strict, but still invaluable, I then propose that the social problems such as poverty demand publicizing practices as a matter of common concern which would otherwise be destined to be forgotten as a private issue, with a particular emphasis on the representative practices which is supposed to be performed meticulously. Lastly, I locate the critical figure of the Syrian refugee mother in the context of Turkey and the newly proposed category of possible rights of having a homeland.