New Turkish diasporas are emerging in geographies, which have hitherto not been associated with migration from Turkey. Literature on Turkish migrant communities has examined immigrant communities in western Europe, challenges of integration and citizenship, as well as Kurdish transnational state-building. Recent works have dealt with Syrian refugees in Turkey, as well as with state-led efforts of diaspora-making. Some scholars have engaged with the emerging spaces of artistic and intellectual emigration to Berlin and London. Very few have conceptualised the globally operating religious-political Gulen movement in terms of diaspora-building. Yet, Turkey's recent 'exit from democracy' and the resulting ruptures and uncertainties have not only intensified the reasons for leaving, they have also multiplied the ethnic, social, professional and religious groups, whose members are engaging in permanent or transitory migration, or, if they are already abroad, do not return for fear of persecution or repression.
Turkish Jews settling in Israel or Spain, followers of Fethullah Gülen in Senegal, upper-middle class Turks in Athens, or LGBT individuals in Istanbul and London face different sets of exclusion or persecution by state agencies in Turkey, and they engage with their country of origin in different ways. The scale ranges from complete disassociation, and even enmity, to the maintenance of regular ties and transnational circulations between diaspora spaces and Turkey. They also engage in complex negotiations of their relationship with the AKP government's 'New Turkey', and with being 'Turkish'. To explore this rapidly multiplying field of communities outside Turkey, for whom the country of origin remains a point of reference, this panel proposes to look at different movements and diasporic constellations to explore how mostly highly-educated, middle-class citizens of Turkey position themselves beyond the nation-state and how they negotiate relations with existing Turkish diasporas and state diaspora policies that oftentimes seek to extend Turkey's governmentality beyond the country's border.
The panel will discuss several case studies based on fresh qualitative field research, exploring the potentialities of these groups to grow into diasporas and to maintain alternatives to the increasingly monist social, cultural and political space of 'new Turkey'. In conceptual terms, these highly differentiated, yet related cases allow us to reconsider some of the core dichotomies of diaspora studies -homeland vs. diaspora-, and investigate whether we may be witnessing the emergence of an 'exilic' and cosmopolitan Turkishness in multiple diasporas.
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Prof. Kerem H L Oktem
Israel is home to at least hundred thousand citizens, whose parents or grandparents have emigrated from Turkey, or who have done so themselves. Migration from Turkey to Israel has occurred in several waves and in various forms, with early cases of Zionist mobilisation in the 1920s, instances during the anti-Semitic incidents in Thrace in the 1930s, mass migration after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and several peaks following political conflicts in Turkey thereafter. The latest episode was triggered by the coup attempt of 15 July 2016.
Despite significant numbers, the 'Turkish' communities are virtually unknown in Turkey and figure as 'unseen Israelis' (Weiker, 1988) in Israel. Neither have they been part of the extensive literature on Turkish migrant communities. This paper discusses the 'invisibility' of this community, exploring how Turkish Jews in Israel negotiate their relations with Turkey (and Israel). Now that the Kemalist state-project, with which many Jews used to identify, has been superseded by a 'New Turkey' dominated by political Islam, anti-Semitic conspiracies, anti-Israel rhetoric and religious exclusionism (Nefes 2017), this relationship is growing evermore multi-layered.
Based on interviews in leading Turkish Jewish associations (Istahdut and Arkada?), with participants of the migration of 1948, and representatives of the former 'Turkish' kibbutz HaGoshrim, this paper explores the potentials, limits and fragmentations of Turkishness in the context of Zionist nation-building. It distinguishes between different waves of migration to Israel, changing conceptions of Turkey, and relations between new arrivals and existing community structures.
On the conceptual level, this paper joins Shneer and Aviv (2010) in questioning some of the core assumptions of diaspora theory, which is based on the historical example of Jewish dispersal from biblical Israel and the implicit assumption that the end of dispersal will lead to an end of diaspora. The case of Turkish Jews in Israel, however, appears to suggest that diasporic constellations are complex and dynamic, pointing to notions of cosmopolitan Jewishness and multiple diasporas within the Jewish world, as well as to multiplying diaspora spaces beyond the Turkish nation-state.
Nefes (2017) Political Roots of Religious Exclusion in Turkey, Parliamentary Affairs.
Shneer and Aviv (2010) Jews as rooted cosmopolitans: the end of diaspora?, in
Knott and McLoughlin, Diasporas, Zed.
Weiker (1988) The unseen Israelis: the Jews from Turkey in Israel, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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Gül Üret
The past few years have witnessed an increasing number of Turkish citizens leaving Turkey for Greece, a trend that has intensified following the failed coup d’état of 15 July 2016. Starting with the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, migration from Turkey to Greece has been intermittent with the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955 and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus of 1974. What makes the current wave notable, however, is the profile of the migrants. While before, those leaving Turkey were Greek Orthodox (Rum), the group migrating today mostly consists of upper-middle class, highly educated Turks, who seek mobility through buying immovable property, which grants a five year residency in Greece and access to the Schengen Area, and the possibility of gaining permanent residency or even upgrading to citizenship in the longer run.
Based on interviews with real estate brokers, upper-middle class Turkish citizens investing in real estate in Athens, as well as individuals of the long-established Turkish communities of Athens’ Palaio Faliro and Nea Smyrni neighborhoods, this paper discusses the personal, social, economic and cultural factors that pose particular motivation for the current wave of Turkish citizens emigrating to Greece under the conditions of ‘new Turkey’, which threatens the lifestyles of groups whose values are not fully aligned with the ruling party’s conservative worldview (Weise, 2017).
Siding with Hirschon (2009) in that the ground of shared experience between the people of the two countries through the long-term separation has been lost, this paper argues that there a century after the population exchange is a notion of Greece being a proximity in terms of geography, culture, and history among the Turks leaving for Greece, which helps us understand why Greece is chosen over countries offering similar visa options such as Spain, Portugal, and Cyprus. This paper seeks to explore the hypothesis that the population exchange of 1923 did not end in the early years of the Republic, yet aims to establish a deeper connection between the Greco-Turkish population exchange and the outflow of Turkish citizens to Greece these days, as the finding of this study suggest that an imagined sense of community has become one of the factors that create new forms of mobilities emerging in the context of ‘new Turkey’.
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Dr. Gabrielle Angey
Until 2013, the Gülen Movement (GM) had opened more than 100 schools in about 50 countries on the African continent. Its followers (businessmen, lobbyists, teachers, imams), constituted a Turkish diaspo-ra aiming at promoting what they defined as a Turkish understanding of an Islamic ethic. In doing so, this diaspora benefited from the support of the AKP government, who, in parallel, launched a Foreign Policy of “Opening up to Africa” from 2003. Turkish public actors and the private actors of the GM were thus collaborating in a network of action aiming at increasing the Turkish share on the African continent.
However, following a conflict emerging in Turkey starting from December 2013, and especially after the failed coup attributed to the GM on 15 July 2016, this strategic alliance came to an end and the conflict became an international one. The followers became an ‘undesired diaspora’ (Turner & Kleist, 2013) and the Turkish government took initiatives to extend its anti-Gulen policy to Sub-Saharan Africa. The Turkish government pressured African states to transfer the Gülen schools to the Turkish semi-public agency, the Maarif Foundation. In Senegal, the eight schools were among the most expensive and top-ranked of the country. Yet, paradoxically, Senegalese authorities accepted to transfer them to the Maa-rif Foundation, unleashing protests of segments of the Senegalese population.
This case study examines the evolution of Turkey’s regime of governmentality beyond its own frontiers, through the way it handles its “undesired diaspora”. It also investigates the ways a transnational social movement based on secrecy and informality can reinvent itself (and be reinvented) through local re-appropriations in Senegal.
This paper relies upon a multi-sited field research conducted between 2014 and 2016 (before the coup attempt of 15 July 2016) in Turkey and Senegal in the framework of a PhD research focusing on the circulations of Turks and Africans in the GM. Interviews and participant observation were conducted both in Turkey and in Senegal in universities, schools, religious dialogue platforms, business associations belonging to the GM as well as with Turkish and Senegalese state officials (TIKA, Diplomats, and Minis-ter of Religious Affairs). After 15 July 2016, I relied largely upon a non-systematic review of Turkey’s and Senegal’s web, press and TV media coverage of the post-failed coup events.
