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Abstract
Combining insights from critical studies on humanitarianism and scholarly work emphasising everyday practices, this study examines Turkish policing of human mobility at European Union borders in two border cities: Edirne and İzmir. Through a focus on the central understandings, justifications and operational responses by Turkish border officials, the article highlights the intertwinement of care and control as inherent to humanitarianism in the daily governance of mobile populations at Turkey’s western borders. In so doing, the findings draw attention to discursive articulations and practices, while pointing to their moral, emotional and cultural elements. The article advances the literature by underlining the centrality of geography in impacting on the logics and practices of governing mobility within the territory of the nation state. The findings also underscore variations in border practices and the embodiment of humanitarianism between the two border cities under investigation as well as across the country. In addition, the article adds to debates on the emerging spaces of humanitarianism by bringing into focus the operation of humanitarian border policing in Turkey before departure and/or after the unsuccessful attempt of border crossing.
Highlights
The 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ has reaffirmed that European Union (EU) borders with Turkey are key crossing points for people escaping war, persecution and poverty
Through a conceptual engagement with the centrality of mundane and dispersed practices in the governance of migration (El Qadim, 2014; Mountz, 2004) and borders (Cote -Boucher et al, 2014), the findings presented here highlight how humanitarianism finds its way into the day-to-day work of governing irregular migration in Turkey at EU borders
The findings underline the centrality of geography in everyday practices of governing im/mobility and stress spatial complexity in the materialisation of humanitarianism and the emergence of spaces of care within the borders of the territorial state
Summary
The 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ has reaffirmed that European Union (EU) borders with Turkey are key crossing points for people escaping war, persecution and poverty. Being on the so-called ‘Eastern Mediterranean Route’, Turkey maintains its importance for migrants to enter the EU through irregular means.. Being on the so-called ‘Eastern Mediterranean Route’, Turkey maintains its importance for migrants to enter the EU through irregular means.1 Turkey has both sea borders and land borders with the EU. According to the 2016 FRONTEX Annual Risk Analysis report, there were more than 800,000 detections of irregular persons on the Eastern-Mediterranean Route in 2015 (FRONTEX, 2016). The so-called Turkey-EU Agreement of 2016 has resulted in a significant decrease of border crossings from Turkey to the EU, the Eastern Mediterranean Route still ranks high in the number of detections at EU external borders (FRONTEX, 2017). The multiplication and diversification of conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere have exacerbated the inhumane and devastating consequences of irregular journeys in the Eastern Mediterranean. There is an intensification of a ‘securitisation’ discourse on refugees in Turkey (Togral Koca, 2016) adding to the ‘precarity’ surrounding the lives of refugees (Senses, 2016), including questions related to the right to citizenship (Baban et al, 2017)
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