Qualitative methods to understand intersectional refugee perceptions on return through a trajectory approach
Lively street in Istanbul, Source: unsplash.com
by: Susan Beth Rottmann, Maissam Nimer | Özyeğin University
Nawal is exactly how I (Susan) remember her, vibrant, energetic, smiling, dressed in a green flowing dress with a white head scarf wrapped in the Turkish style. We are sitting at the Fatih Municipality café, a cavernous grey-brown room with large windows looking onto Adnan Menderes Boulevard. Nawal orders carrot cake along with two hot teas, and we begin chatting about our lives….
I was looking forward to hearing about her children and the daycare she had been running. But, my happiness at seeing her is quickly tempered by the turn our conversation takes, centering on her desire to leave Turkey. She tells me of her plan to apply to the lottery programme for U.S. resettlement and enquired about a newly started sponsorship programme. I ask her for the reason behind this unexpected decision, and she says, “We don’t have residence permits in Turkey, just kimlik (Temporary Protection Status) so they can send us back to Syria at any time.” She relates that the election in May 2023 was a turning point for Syrians during which they realised that if President Erdogan was ever defeated, they would be forcibly returned to Syria[1].
The daycare she was running had closed because neighbours complained about the noise and the rents were too high to find another place. Now, the family is in a difficult economic situation. Nawal is teaching Arabic online to a few students and her husband (who works in the dry-cleaning industry) does not have regular work as such, although entitled to it through their temporary protection status, neither of them has official work permits. Like so many, they are victims of the rental crisis affecting several cities in Turkey, and especially Istanbul, and the high inflation rate, but as Syrian nationals without work permits and access to many support services, they are rendered even more vulnerable.
I asked Nawal whether or not she would consider returning to Syria. She tells me that her family lives in Damascus, but her husband escaped military service by leaving the country. She added that anyone who lived in Turkey had to talk to intelligence agencies if they were to return to Syria and subsequently, they mostly get disappeared. For her, the only option is refugee resettlement to the US, Canada or Europe. For the time being, she feels she is an open-air prison in Turkey with nowhere to go.
When I met her in 2016, she was extremely happy and hopeful about the future. She had said: “From the beginning of my marriage, I was telling my husband that I dreamed of travelling to Turkey. I love Turkey because it is an Islamic country firstly, and a developed country…I am not afraid for my daughter. Wherever we go, we find a comfortable environment similar to our home. So, we don’t want to leave it.” She related some difficult experiences with local parents at her daughter’s school, but she was confident in her ability to gradually break down barriers between Turks and Syrians, and she explained that she had good relationships with Turkish neighbors after learning Turkish.
The situation of Nawal is reflective of several other Syrian (women) whose situation in Turkey has started to feel unbearable, despite initial optimism, or having previously rejected opportunities to migrate further (for reasons such as cultural affinity, economic stability and closeness to Syria among others) at the beginning of the crisis. The option of return is not on the table at all due to the dangers of the current situation in Syria for refugees that reside in Turkeyand can be viewed as traitors by the Syrian regime.
GAPs aims to decentre the dominant, one-sided understanding of ‘return policymaking’ by bringing multiple perspectives into play and studying the complex interaction of diverse actors (including migrants themselves) involved in the return processes. More specifically, in WP7 we adopt an anthropological approach, using life story, repeated encounters and reflexivity to meet the objective of exploring the different forms of agency that migrants mobilize and the autonomy of migration processes that are influenced by the governance and integration contexts migrants confront. This approach allows us to explore the intersectionality of positions for people like Nawal, who are women, migrants and economically precarious. It also provides the potential to disrupt state governance categories of “migrant,” “returnee,” and “integration” (Amalina et al, 2021), t. Beyond the migrant/non-migrant and researcher/subject divide, we can hope to transcend state-centric perspectives, overcome methodological nationalism and more fully explore social identities and domination, while providing new insights about belonging and conviviality across differences. GAPs is interested in how people affected by deportation regimes define return, assistance and voluntariness.
Our anthropological approach seeks to highlight perceptions, experiences and emotions (hope/despair, capacity to move on with life/resilience) as a means of understanding what return means for people involved in it. We ultimately explore the characteristics of trajectories in different locations (with the goal of developing a typology) to show the precarity, plurality and multi-directionality of mobility. In this way, the precise definition of return is an open question and we expect multiple conceptions to emerge from the field research. An empirical focus on trajectories, brings out the continuous adjustments and constant navigations that migrants engage in, as reflected in Nawal’s trajectory over time. It allows us to bring out the stark contrasts that emerge over time in the hopes, dreams and experiences and the subsequent feelings about movement: whether it is migrating further, plans for returning, or fears of deportation; all of these appear to dynamically change over time, and with circumstances that come out through the life story interviews.
References
[1] For more information about election discourses about Syrian migrants, see here (https://www.returnmigration.eu/gapsblog/turkiyes-2023-elections-navigating-the-controversial-terrain-of-return-migration) and here (https://www.returnmigration.eu/gapsblog/the-politicization-of-refugees-in-turkeys-elections-is-not-yet-over)
Contact:
Susan Beth Rottmann| Özyeğin University (OzU) | susan.rottmann@ozyegin.edu.tr
Maissam Nimer| Özyeğin University (OzU) | msnimer@gmail.com