Turkey's responses to refugees: past and present

Abstract

Turkey has had a long history of welcoming refugees, but mainly with an instrumental approach to serve for its national consolidation through its nation-building process, as it generously opens its borders primarily to the arrival of people with “Turkish origin and descent”. Over the last three decades, however, Turkey has also been faced with the arrival of an increasing number refugees with different ethnic and national backgrounds, and its refugee regime has been severely put to the test to accommodate the requirements of a globally recognized international refugee regime. In this context, Turkey’s European Union candidacy process required serious Europeanization efforts to modernize the country’s immigration and refugee regulations, and consequently the country managed to have a set of legal and administrative tools to tackle with the refugee arrivals. In the 2010s, the arrival of Syrian refugees and the developments of the AKP government’s instrumentalist approach to refugees, which is blended with its hegemonic civilizationist and Islamic populist styles, marked a period which represents both the rupture and continuity in Turkey’s traditional refugee policies and practices. What remains central to the refugee-related policy debates in this period is that the refugee question in Turkey has emerged as a conflict between refugee rights and the national interest.