The Precarious Lives of Syrians: Migration, Citizenship, and Temporary Protection in Turkey [Paperback]

Turkey now hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, more than 3.6 million of the 12.7 million displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Many of them are subject to an unpredictable temporary protection, forcing them to live under vulnerable and insecure conditions.The Precarious Lives of Syrians examines the three dimensions of the architecture of precarity: Syrian migrants' legal status, the spaces in which they live and work, and their movements within and outside Turkey. The difficulties they face include restricted access to education and healthcare, struggles to secure employment, language barriers, identity-based discrimination, and unlawful deportations. Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan, and Kim Rygiel show that Syrians confront their precarious conditions by engaging in cultural production and community-building activities, and by undertaking perilous journeys to Europe, allowing them to claim spaces and citizenship while asserting their rights to belong, to stay, and to escape. The authors draw on migration policies, legal and scholarly materials, and five years of extensive field research with local, national, and international humanitarian organizations, and with Syrians from all walks of life.The Precarious Lives of Syrians offers a thoughtful and compelling analysis of migration precarity in our contemporary context.

The Precarious Lives of Syrians reveals the vulnerability and insecurity that Syrian refugees confront in Turkey, including their socio-legal status, living conditions, and mobility. Drawing on legal and scholarly materials, as well as extensive field research, it provides a thoughtful and compelling appraisal of the experience of migration.

A vital read  not only for those with an interest in the plight of Syrian refugees, but also for all those concerned about the death of asylum as a concept and practice, and the discursive disappearance of the refugee or erosion of the idea that people who seek asylum mal“?