PhD dissertation: Boundaries of Brotherhood - Syrian Refugee Reception and National Identity Contestation in Turkey

What is the role of religious and ethnic identity in how host society members relate to refugees?

Both in academia and politics, many have stressed the importance of similarity along these lines for social acceptance and integration, for how refugees should geographically be distributed, and for how refugee reception should be narrated. Others, in contrast, have found that religious and ethnic commonalities between hosts and newcomers could, in fact, also lead to more rejection rather than less. And still others have argued that what really mattered were the values that may be tied to the religious or ethnic identity of host society members, irrespective of commonalities with the refugees.

In this context, Turkey presents an interesting case study. Being both a religiously and ethnically diverse society, it hosts today the highest absolute number of refugees worldwide. Around 3.7 million of these are from Syria who have newly arrived in the country as of 2011. In receiving them, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has often invoked a Muslim and Ottoman ‘brotherhood’ between Turks and Syrians, trying to boost social acceptance of the refugees through a civilisationist policy narrative intended to widen the boundaries of Turkish society in a way that would include the newcomers. Ironically, this directly parallels the equally civilisationist ‘Christianist’ discourse against Syrian refugees of nativist politicians in Europe. On the other hand, presenting a new broader vision of society is precisely what sociologists like Robert Putnam have recommended to foster social cohesion in the face of immigration. So, how is this identity discourse reflected in Turkish society?

Using the analytical framework of social and symbolic boundaries, this thesis aims to investigate the role of Turkish citizens’ different religious (secular vs. religiously-conservative) and ethnic (self-identified Turkish vs. self-identified Kurdish or Arab) identities in their relation to the Syrian refugees, who themselves are largely religiously-conservative Sunni Muslims and Arab or Kurdish. This research question presents a puzzle because neither of the above-mentioned theories can fully make sense of the thus far existing evidence, which indicates partial support for all of them. To solve this puzzle and fill this gap, this thesis pursues a grounded theory approach that departs from the assumption that neither social boundaries (With whom do I interact?) nor symbolic ones (Who belongs to ‘us’?) can be estimated a priori but must be identified empirically and bottom up.

To do so, this thesis draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, including 115 semi-structured in-depth with Turkish neighbourhood representatives (muhtars) in three different cities (Izmir, Konya and Şanlıurfa) that are known for their similarities and differences to each other regarding their inhabitants’ predominant religious and ethnic identities. Based on the street-level narrative data thus gathered, this thesis then develops a new theoretical model that suggests an alternative mechanism to explain the role of religious and ethnic identity this case. In a final step, this theory is then put to an empirical test by means of a survey experiment, drawing on original data from two nationally representative surveys (n=2,700), conducted especially for this thesis both before and after the Turkish elections in May 2023.

On this basis, I argue that while Turkish citizens’ religious and ethnic identities, in fact, make no difference for the social boundaries they draw vis-à-vis the Syrian refugees, they do affect their symbolic ones, with religiously conservative and ethnically Kurdish or Arab Turkish citizens presenting a more inclusive vision of Turkish society vis-à-vis the Syrian refugees. However, this is not because they actually feel closer to the Syrian refugees than their secular or ethnically Turkish counterparts, but because they thereby retaliate against the latter for the exclusion from ‘the centre of Turkish society’ (Şerif Mardin) they feel to have experienced in the past due to their own religious and ethnic identity. Their higher symbolic inclusiveness vis-à-vis the Syrian refugees, which is not mirrored at the social level, is thus not a reflection of a genuinely better relationship with the refugees, but of Turkey’s pre-existing identity struggle inside its society and the increasingly polarised environment that this takes place in. In short, Turkey’s Syrian refugee reception represents a new arena of its national identity contestation.