This paper examines the social and economic integration of Syrian refugees in Turkey. In light of the United Nations’ 2013 estimates of some over 2 million displaced Syrian people in total and over 700,000 in Turkey alone, it is of critical importance to investigate the issues and difficulties that Syrian refugees face while in the process of consolidation with the host society. In Turkey, in addition to the occupants of the 22 refugee camps, more than 500,000 Syrians live in urban areas throughout the country, especially those cities close to the Syrian border such as Hatay, Gaziantep, and Mersin. Few of these refugees are on official record; in fact, most are not. With no end in sight to the civil war in Syria, these refugees’ status, officially defined as “temporary protected” could realistically become of a more permanent nature— particularly given 2001 European temporary direction legislation. In this context, the article questions the scope of the integration process, examining refugees’ social and economic activities through exploration of their jobs, incomes, education, social relations with Turkish society and their attitudes towards going back to Syria. Lastly, in becoming an increasingly popular destination country for migrants, the social structure of Turkey is changing. Since the number of immigrants grows each year, obstacles to their full integration could become one of the major issues in the official national agenda. The analyses in the article result from fieldwork conducted in Adana and Mersin, cities located in the south of Turkey close to Syria border. The data was collected via a semi-structured questionnaire administered to over 100 Syrian interviewees, in-depth individual interviews and group meetings.

A key feature of recent complex transformations in the Arab World is the reversal in popular perceptions of political agency and participation which is manifest, in its most dramatic forms, in collective public acts of disruptive politics, and, in its most expressive forms, in the plethora of individual and collective voices engaged in creative telling and witnessing and in constructing alternative modes of being what Ariella Azoulay terms “citizens in practice.” Different aspects and meanings of these voices as well as the ideologies or interests they represent have been discussed in the burgeoning literature on the Arab uprisings. However, little attention has been paid to the mediated narratives these voices tell or to the ways in which these narratives invite affective and experienced co-identifications with real lived socio-political situations and ways of knowing that can propel activism, and, as such, help explain how or why people who are not formally organized in political parties or social movements move from cultures of political disengagement to cultures of political agency and public dissent. This paper argues that paying attention to the role of narratives in mobilization, particularly in the absence of formal political parties, is particularly relevant in addressing the diverse and multiple emerging voices and their role in Syria where a popular uprising that began in March 2011 against the regime of Bashar al-Assad has turned into a brutal and bloody sectarian conflict. The paper draws on debates in social movement theory and activism as well as on an analysis of a select number of narrative practices made visible and circulated on a number of Syrian “protest websites” created by activists and ordinary people to contest and negotiate power. These practices, understood following Foucault as “knowing” practices that come out of particular historical formations offer, I argue, make disorder visible and offer alternative understandings and different readings of the nation. The focus on narrative practices in digital media platforms is not intended to privilege social or new media over other spaces where narratives are told, mediated, enacted and circulated. Rather, it is intended to underline the fact that it is in these new media platforms, particularly YouTube and Facebook, that Syrian activists and ordinary citizens are making public aesthetic and narrative aspects of what George Marcus has called the “activist imagery” and in which contestations over the shifting story of the Syrian nation are played out most visibly.

This paper researches the Syrian literary discourse during the last three years that witnessed a prolonged war and continuous conflicts by exploring a number of recent representative literary works along with the debates that they aroused. The paper follows closely the ways in which Syrian litterateurs and intellectuals are engaged in a large-scale writing of this agonizing experience of their nation and the way they view war: not only a time of death and destruction, but also a time of ideological upheavals and cultural confusion. The paper begins with a historiographical introduction to discuss the difficulties of defining recent Syrian literature within the conventions of what is termed by contemporary Arab cultural and literary critics as the War-literature, Revolutionary literature and the Resistance literature. These difficulties emerge from the new narrative modes and themes put forward by the Syrian novels that were published after March 2011. The novels are preoccupied by two concerns. The first is: claiming the right to tell the war story from a gendered Syrian perspective by challenging the heroic self-righteous claims of the battling parties and subverting their dominant hegemonic discourse that subjected women consistently to invisibility, containment, appropriation and stereotyping, especially in media. The second is constructing experimental spaces in which they struggle to produce narratives that can be recognized for its literary excellence and find their way into the record of world classics of women’s anti-war narratives. This double-quest is accompanied by more complicated questions related to violence, religion, identity, feminism, modernity, civil rights, patriarchal authority and media cultural construction. Such debates have become inseparable from the literary concerns of the Syrian women’s war-narratives. The paper makes use of empirical work and data collected during 18 month that were spent sporadically in various Syrian towns and cities during the last 3 years, along with drawing upon some master references in war narratives and women’s writing, as well as on recent researches on cultural and literary studies. The argument follows an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the Syrian women’s war-narratives as a central area of scholarly inquiry and as a site of creative resistance, emphasizing that combining historical, cultural and literary perspectives can illuminate these complex texts.

In a now-classic piece in political geography, Agnew (1994) railed against the “territorial trap” of international relations theory, arguing for a framework capable of charting a geopolitical reality no longer defined by state borders. In post-colonial states like Syria, such advice strikes a powerful cord given the legacy of its “artificial” borders and the complex interactions among global and local actors that produced them (Barr 2013; Seale 2010). Yet the discursive work of these borders continues to affect political struggle in Syria below the surface. As the violence in Syria enters its fourth year, its increasingly “sectarian” character has engendered a number of problematic spatial imaginaries, in the academy, popular media, and among participants in the violence which are far from neutral representations. Some of these center on borders themselves as historical artifacts, while others attempt to redraw maps of the region along sectarian lines. Yet in whatever guise, spatial imaginaries profoundly shape how and where we study political violence in the case of Syria. This exploratory paper examines the spatial processes that produce sectarian violence in Syria from afar, drawing on insights from political geography – in particular, critical geopolitics and the so-called “relational turn” in geographic theory. I begin with some definitions for the purposes of clarity. I then transition to a discourse analysis of territorial approaches to the conflict, focusing on the “failed state” and “identity politics” narratives of the Syrian civil war and situating these within their disciplinary contexts in the academy. I then define and examine how geography’s recent “relational turn” might give us the language to transcend the trap adherent in territorial analyses of Syria’s civil war, and illustrate the increasing salience of this perspective in the popular media. I will conclude with a few notes on the limits to such an approach, as well as questions for future research. It is a central concern of this paper that territorial imaginaries of the conflict, which stress proximity over connectivity, underplay those actors and processes contributing to the conflict whose spatial dynamics are less straightforward, preferring to demonize or de-historicize rather than examine them in their own right. Iran’s exclusion from Geneva 2 is a case-in-point. Returning these to the light allows for a more robust conversation about where to locate relevant causes of civil war onset, duration and thus prospects for peace in Syria.

Based on field research among the refugee population in Lebanon (Beirut and its suburbs, Tripoli, Wadi Khaled, Akkar), Jordan (Amman, Irbid), and Turkey (Istanbul) during June through August 2012 and again from September through November 2013 this article explores how Syrian refugees are pursuing alternative political visions after their displacement and thereby shaping the ‘new Syria.’ Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey are not just host countries for about 2 million Syrians, they are sites where the ‘new and future Syria’ are being conceptualized. Many of the initial leaders of the non-violent demonstrations which launched the March 2011 Syrian Uprising turned to relief when the uprising became militarized. When conditions became too violent, they left to neighboring countries and helped launch civil society and relief operations there. In the cities, towns and refugee sites within those countries lie new worlds that revolve around the category of ‘the refugee.’ However these are worlds with their own symbols, political visions and alliances, economic networks, and intellectual production. They are locations where Syrians are trying to make sense of the confusion, uncertainty and instability of the moment while venturing in their project of creating the vision of future Syria. It is led or shaped by Syrians who are themselves displaced, even registered refugees but with distinct backgrounds, socio-economic statuses, education levels, and visions for a future Syria. They exist as grant managers, teachers, accountants, psychosocial therapists, workshop leaders, lawyers, day laborers, and dependent refugees. The field research includes participant observation and interviews with Syrian activists and civil society organizations, local and international relief workers as well as citizens and activists from the host countries. In addition the article combines this micro bottom-up approach with macro analyses of top-down economic recovery plans and other post-conflict reconstruction visions including ones produced by the Friends of Syria, Legatum Institute, ESCWA, and Clingendael Institute of International Relations. Drawing on the fields of post-conflict recovery, refugee and forced migration studies, and previous research on Iraqi and Palestinian refugees, I focus on how the host countries are becoming a host for a proliferation of a Syrian ‘civil society’ that is both shaped by the host context as well as the intellectual debates surrounding the Syrian uprising as well as trying to shape competing visions of national identity and future Syria.

What began as anti-regime protests in Syria in March 2011 (Migration Policy Center, 2013) – in the atmosphere of anti-government protests elsewhere in the region – the crisis in Syria has dragged on for several years and led to the death of over 100,000 people. According to official figures, over the past three years, 6.5 million have been displaced, and more than 2.4 million Syrians are seeking refuge in neighboring countries, over 880,000 in Lebanon, over 600,00 in Turkey, and over 580,000 in Jordan (UNHCR, 2014). In such disastrous situations access to media changes as do daily and social needs. This paper examines how displaced populations use what media are available to them in a time of war in order to fulfill their needs, whether for information or entertainment. Over 2000 Syrian refugees between the ages of 18 and 65 in Syria and in the three countries with the highest number of displaced, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, were surveyed concerning their media use. The aim of the research was to reveal what news media are available during conflict, which sources are most trusted and followed, what media channels fulfill which needs and gratifications, and what media sources and needs people prioritize during times of war and distress. Their media habits were then compared against their original county of residence, current residence, and various demographic variables. Literature on the effect of war on media uses and media-related needs is scarce, as is research on media uses of refugees and displaced persons in this region and beyond. The present research aims to begin to fill that lacuna, and analyzes the findings within three theoretical frameworks, uniquely applied to a war and conflict situation: media uses and gratifications, selective exposure and media dependency, and uncertainty reduction theory (c.f. Boyle et al. 2004; Bratić 2006; Dotan and Cohen 1976; Katz, Haas, & Gurevitch 1973; Ruggiero, 2000). Unfortunately, as a region plagued by continuous conflict and civil strife, the Middle East is ripe for war and media effects research. Research on such media uses offers a better understanding of how news sources can deliver appropriate content to Arab populations during dangerous and uncertain situations.