This paper aims at deciphering the articulation of Cyprus in contemporary migration movements from the Middle East to Europe. The island has historically absorbed ethnically or religiously persecuted groups in the Levant, a phenomenon acquiring new dimensions in the 21st century with EU accession and the increase of forced displacement in the region. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with government officials and three distinct refugee groups (Palestinians from Iraq and Syrian Kurds, both stateless and arriving in the mid-2000s; Syrians arriving after 2011), this paper argues that Middle Eastern refugees in Cyprus move along the intersection of three border conditions, whose logics not only complement but also contradict each other. Despite its proximity, Cyprus has received comparatively few refugees fleeing the wars in Syria and Iraq. This results from efforts by the Greek Cypriot authorities to deter arrivals, by rarely granting refugee status to forcefully displaced individuals. In turn, these measures are linked to the country’s divided status, as the mostly Muslim refugees are often perceived as “Turkish agents” aiming to alter the island’s demography. In addition, EU asylum laws and the lack of EU citizenship, separate the refugees from other subaltern groups, such as eastern European economic migrants. While restricting their mobility to the island, this factor nonetheless functions as an existential incentive for rights-based mobilization. Finally, the status of the Cypriot postcolonial space as a geopolitical borderline between Europe and the Middle East, differentiates the experience of exile from that in other EU countries. The social reality of cultural pluralism as an “Eastern residual” contradicts the dominant ideology of ethnic nationalism, lending subversive qualities to the articulation of a civic identity. By developing feelings of belonging due to perceived cultural similarities, and contesting social and even citizenship rights, refugees participate in negotiating the politically sensitive parameters of Cypriotness. The dialectic of multiple exclusionary borders thus moves beyond the simple reproduction of dualities, by enabling a process of implicit integration, as well as by interrogating self-perceptions among a borderland society. The paper therefore concludes by conceptualizing Cyprus’s ongoing historical role as a social space of exile in the Middle East, contradicting European paradigms on refugee integration through a discerned process of “regionalization through exclusion”, thus urging us to (re-)consider the ways in which the interaction of forced displacement with various border regimes reactivates linkages between the Middle East and peripheral European regions.

Many Syrian refugees in Turkey fear becoming victims of organ trafficking. I examine these fears through a study of both the rumors of organ trafficking which circulate in Syrian communities in Izmir, Turkey, and their first hand narratives of structural racism. Their own words describe the ways in which racism, the extraction of their labor, and possible bio-extraction are legitimately fearsome. However, organ trafficking is indeterminately real. I examine the possible truths of these rumors and inquire into their sociopolitical meanings. Stories of structural racism are abundant in Izmir. My 2017 data reflect the first hand narratives of Syrian women and men who have had negative and traumatic encounters with Turkish interlocutors in their daily lives. These include the abusive doctor who delivers beatings to Syrian mothers,  the Turkish elementary school teacher whose Syrian students remain illiterate, the threatening and racist landlords who cause housing scarcity, the bosses who refuse medical access to Syrian workers, the injustice of earning half the salary of Turkish workers and sometimes being denied payment, the neighborhood officials who keep Syrians from getting aid, and the dismissive bureaucrats of Turkish aid who deny assistance. What all of these represent, however, are corporeal experiences of violence and discrimination, and an awareness by Syrians of the larger structure of xenophobia against Syrians in Izmir. Veena Das (2007) has written that rumor is a reflection of chains of connection and translation, which can contextualize political and historical events. Using twelve months of interviews with Syrian families and individuals, I ground their experiences of being Other within the local social hierarchy of urban Izmir, Turkey. I consider how Syrians translate and make meaning from violence in their daily lives according to a shared political and historical timeframe from a subaltern perspective. I argue that an accumulation of events of violence on national and local scales gives legitimacy to the rumors with circulate. My analysis reveals a growing mistrust of the Turkish State amongst Syrians, a general state of vulnerability, and the imminent danger of violence in everyday life. These Syrian anxieties persist despite free education, health care, the support of the ruling government, and access to citizenship for educated professional Syrians.

Migrants and Slaves: Human Trafficking in the Libyan Territories from the Nineteenth Century to the Present In the fall of 2017, the world was shocked when CNN released footage of twelve male Nigerian migrants being sold at auction outside of the capital city of Tripoli. The question of slavery has been widely debated in Middle East Studies, with scholars such as Chouki El Hamel, and W. G Clarence-Smith arguing that racial bias enabled the enslavement of free black Muslims on a mass scale in North Africa and other parts of the Middle East until the mid-nineteenth century. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed the relationship between the long history of racial bias and its connection to the treatment of migrants and refugees in the region today. In addition, there is almost no scholarship on slavery in the Libyan context. Our paper addresses the issue of human trafficking and slavery with special attention to the role of radicalized thought in the Libyan territories from the nineteenth century to the present. Specifically, in our project, we will be looking at Italian colonial documents, missionary correspondences and the Arab press, in order to show the role of Islamic slavery in the Libyan territories until its abolishment in the 1930s and the intellectual justifications for the institution. We will then address the connection between historic institutions of slavery and modern human trafficking and enslavement since the collapse of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's government in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. We argue that modern human trafficking is substantially different from Islamic slavery in its organization but both practices have been made possible by underlying racial bias. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining slavery in the past and present, sheds new light on the rarely-studied issue of forced labor in the Libyan context.

This paper examines the diplomacy surrounding Hungarian and Polish revolutionaries from 1848/1849 who requested—and received—international protection from the Ottoman Empire according to European international law and traditions of political asylum. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the practice of political asylum became institutionalized in European international law. Based largely on treaties, political asylum began as an effort to depoliticize the protection or extradition of political agitators and revolutionaries, but quickly acquired an idealized veneer as an expression of universal human values. This paper looks at how the Ottoman Empire invoked European legal traditions in its assertion of the right to offer asylum to the refugees of 1848/49 and how the Ottoman Sultan inserted the language of “humanity” into his diplomatic negotiations over the refugees with Europe’s great powers. The paper argues that it was in fact because of the Ottoman Empire’s subordinate position in international law that “humanity” and “humanitarianism” became a central and enduring feature of the diplomatic discourse of political asylum. The exact number of individuals who fled to Ottoman territory after the failed revolutions of 1848-1849 is unclear; Ottoman and European sources broadly agree on around 5,000 Hungarian soldiers, a figure that does not seem to include dependents and other civilians, let alone up to 6,000 Poles. Both Russia and Austria submitted extradition requests, basing their demands on existing bilateral treaties that the Ottomans argued were being tendentiously misinterpreted. The Ottoman’s refusal to extradite precipitated an international crisis, leading Britain and France to move their Mediterranean fleets to protect Istanbul from a potential Russian attack. The apparently small question of political asylum brought Europe’s great powers to the brink of war. Using sources in Turkish, German, French, and English, this paper will show how the Ottoman’s success in repulsing Russian and Austrian extradition demands enabled the Ottoman Empire to lay claim to the “standard of civilization” and membership in the European family of nations. Ottoman diplomacy inserted the language of “humanity” into the laws of asylum. The Sultan described this as an “effect of the sentiments of humanity,” while diplomats invoked humanity to articulate concerns over likely punishments should the revolutionaries be extradited. Throughout, the concept of humanity informed and buttressed the idea of an “honourable” policy that elevated European sympathies for the Ottoman Empire while reifying and universalizing a central aspect of European international law.