Refugees from Syria: State Policies, Humanitarian Aid, and the Lived Experience of Exile
Panel 131, 2017 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 20 at 10:30 am
Panel Description
What explains host state and international aid policies toward refugees from Syria, and how do these policies shape the lived experiences of exile?
This interdisciplinary panel brings together anthropologists and political scientists to discuss original research scrutinizing policies directed toward refugees and how displaced Syrians and Palestinian-Syrians navigate the contexts structured by those policies.
Focusing on the Turkish case, one paper examines state decision-making and another probes refugees’ community building. Adding Lebanon and Germany to the conversation, two other papers explore the nexus of state interventions and refugees’ initiatives. The collection encourages us to consider the new questions and insights that arise when state-oriented and society-centered analyses are considered in tandem.
The first paper examines the causes and consequences of Turkey’s formalization of “temporary protection” status for Syrian refugees. Comparing this legal regime to Turkey’s responses to previous refugee crises, the author demonstrates how states’ refusal to recognize certain populations as asylum-seekers or refugees grants policymakers leeway to maneuver around international and domestic pressures.
The second paper compares observations from fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Turkey and Germany. It argues that, in Germany, strong state intervention in refugee integration has a leveling effect on refugees’ pre-existing class differences. In Turkey, by contrast, a relatively unregulated environment compounds refugees’ socio-economic differences, enabling those with greater resources to carve pathways to wealth and comfort, while providing others with little protection from impoverishment or exploitation.
The third paper explores how humanitarian aid shapes the intertwined development of associations and self-governance among Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon. Based on ethnography in the Bekaa valley, it examines a particular incident -- a destructive electrical fire that precipitated a major influx of humanitarian resources -- and evaluates how the effects of that event in expanding NGO work and institutionalizing governance structures in an informal camp.
The final paper presents field research in an Istanbul-based community center that was founded by a Palestinian from Syria’s Yarmouk camp and endeavors to provide a sense of home to both Syrian and Palestinian refugees from Syria. The paper considers how the center shapes possibilities for Syro-Palestinian solidarity, highlighting commonalities and differences in their experiences and destabilizing dominant humanitarian and political assumptions about refugees.
In dialogue with each other, these papers open a rich conversation on how politics, humanitarianism, and refugees’ own agency interact to generate the possibilities and constraints that shape refugees’ new lives.
Even as Turkey took in close to three million Syrians at great expense, Turkish officials were referring to these individuals as temporary guests rather than refugees. Despite significant legal developments in the country, and particularly the recent formalization of a temporary protection regime, this choice of labels reveals the influence of underlying political trends on Turkish policy-making regarding refugees. This paper compares Turkey’s reactions to the Syrian inflow with its responses to previous refugee crises, including Iraqis in 1988, Bosnians in 1992, and Kosovars in 1998. In so doing, it demonstrates that the refusal to designate certain populations as asylum-seekers or refugees enables Turkey to opt in or out of what might otherwise appear to be generally-applicable, national-level policies. Through these strategic semantics, policymakers retain a freedom to maneuver in response to international and domestic political pressures.
In refugee studies, refugees are often analyzed abstractly as victims of violence and forced migration, legally as rights-holders under international statutes, or demographically as a population distinct from the societies from which they have come and to which they have arrived.
These perspectives are useful for examining an array of important questions, but obscure many factors that both signal salient differences among refugees and vitally shape the lived experience of exile. One such factor is refugees’ own socioeconomic backgrounds. The wealth, education level, and class identity that individuals had before fleeing their homelands affects many dimensions of their post-flight lives, including their future expectations, their sense of what they have lost, and the personal resources that they bring to the challenge of integration and starting anew. At the same time, refugees’ prior class status does not have an unmediated impact on their subsequent socioeconomic trajectories. Rather, like other aspects of refugees’ new worlds, they are filtered though the particular circumstances that they encounter in their new lands of exile, and thus vary with those circumstances themselves.
This paper explores how host state contexts shape refugees’ experiences of socioeconomic class through comparative analysis of Syrian refugee communities in Turkey and Germany. In Turkey, the state has relatively been slow in issuing and enforcing regulations and thus, at least during the first years of the Syrian conflict, largely left Syrians to “go it alone.” I argue that this weak state intervention in the realms of absorption and integration compounds the socioeconomic differences that Syrians carry with them. Refugees with greater personal resources carve pathways to comfort and success, while those with fewer resources meet with little protection from impoverishment or exploitation. In Germany, by contrast, the state and its bureaucracy impose their overpowering presence upon the lives of refugees as upon citizens themselves. Such strong intervention has a leveling effect on refugees’ pre-existing class differences. At least during the first years of the asylum process, asylum seekers’ housing, work prospects, and everyday experiences are heavily structured by law and integration programs, which affect the richer and poorer among them without distinction and thereby lessen the significance of those differences.
This paper explores these differences, pulling upon nine months of field research in Turkey and Germany between 2013 and 2017, and illustrating its claims with testimonials from interviews with dozens of displaced Syrians in both countries.
Refugees often live in contexts defined by severely constrained rights and limited access to legal protections and public services, leaving their communities to bear significant responsibility for self-governance. As part of a project on the politics of organizing and governance in Syrian refugee communities, I examine how humanitarian aid influxes create both positive and perverse incentives for Syrian-run NGOs and camps to create governance institutions. Based on participant observation and interviews, I conducted an ethnography with a Syrian-run NGO and a camp in the Bekaa valley, to trace the intertwined development of the Syrian NGO sector and Syrian camps, which I present as the two foremost repertoires of Syrian institution-building in Lebanon.
To draw inferences about how humanitarian aid affects local governance, I turn to a pivotal event in the camp's development: an electrical fire that destroyed half the community's homes, and precipitated a major influx of humanitarian resources and subsequent institutionalization of governance structures. Before the fire, only one NGO worked in the camp, the small Syrian-run NGO with which I conducted my ethnography. In response to the fire, a number of large international NGOs began supporting the camp and the NGO -- increasing the amount of resources in the camp, the influence of leaders, and the visibility of the camp and NGO to the local community. I treat the fire as a single-case natural experiment, which allows us to study the effect of the influx of humanitarian resources into the camp and NGO.
Al-Nur is a community center for Syrian and Palestinian-Syrian refugees in Istanbul. It was founded in 2014 by a second-generation Palestinian refugee from Yarmouk camp in Syria. The center hosts a variety of activities ranging from English and Turkish language courses to piano lessons, to creative writing, all taught by local as well as international volunteers. The organization’s website notes that “Istanbul has many refugees from Syria but no refugee camps.” Whether Istanbul’s lack of refugee camps is good or bad is not elaborated on, but the community center clearly sees itself as providing a sense of home to refugees from Syria, both Syrian and Palestinian. Although created by a Palestinian–Syrian refugee, al-Nur caters to all those who were displaced from Syria rather than specifically to Palestinians who were displaced from Syria. Thus, it offers an interesting vantage point from which to reflect on Syro-Palestinian relations outside of Syria and to think about commonalities as well as differences in the experiences of exile of both populations. It also offers a vantage point for examining Syro-Palestinian solidarity within the context of exile in Turkey. While its creation was part of an effort to reach out to refugees from Syria, the center welcomes anyone who would like to take advantage of the classes offered there.
My paper is based on fieldwork conducted during a month and a half at al-Nur. During this time, I took part in al-Nur’s activities and interviewed its director, managing, staff, and volunteers, many of whom are themselves refugees from Syria. I focus on the ways in which the philosophy that guides al-Nur and the personal experiences of its staff destabilize the dominant humanitarian and political assumptions that shape our perception of refugees in the 21st century.
