Border mobility, state power, and war

Since the armed conflict in Syria, the Turkish state has reinforced its authority over the mobility of people with the goal of conditioning and benefiting from cross-border mobility. Depending on the transnational dynamics and the political economy of the war, the Turkish state has adopted different strategies, technologies, and protocols to govern cross-border movements. These processes have generated performative encounters and fluid relations among state agents, non-state armed actors, smugglers, and border crossers. For those who cross the border, these encounters determine their subject position vis-à-vis state power. Based on six years of ethnographic inquiry conducted on the Turkish-Syrian border (2016-2022), I explore the political meaning of cross-border mobility by focusing on the experiences of Syrian refugees and analysing the logics and practices of human mobility governance and its relationship to the spatial concentration of state power across the border

Border crossing · Immigration · Political science · Refugee · Syrian refugees · Turkish · Computer Science · Law · Middle East Politics and Society · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Turkey's Politics and Society