Does social cohesion solve forced migration riddles? troubled concepts and constrained practices in Turkey

Abstract

Amid the epistemic divide about what social cohesion means as a foundational concept, the pursuit of social integration as a policy objective is more desirable than ever among policy makers. While scholarly debates seek to restore conceptual clarity for social cohesion and social integration separately, referring to them interchangeably in policy reports seems to go conveniently unnoticed across different migration contexts. This study seeks answers to the question: how does the concept of social cohesion manifest itself in forced migration contexts? It does so by first reviewing the state of the art on social cohesion-forced migration nexus to identify the recurring themes and substitute concepts in the literature. Secondly, based on an in-depth textual analysis of 327 scholarly articles and policy reports on the forcibly displaced theme in Turkey published between 2011 and 2018, this study presents a classification of conceptual frames on social cohesion in forced migration contexts as security threat-based, humanitarian emergency-driven, policy regime-oriented, and socio-interactional. One of the main findings is that the existing social cohesion models of the settlement countries do not explain what has been unfolding in Turkey in the post-2011 period with the mass influx of the forcibly displaced and ongoing conflict at its borders. The study concludes with a discussion on why integrating policy regime-oriented and socio-interactional approaches are more likely to advance both the quest for conceptual clarity around social cohesion and facilitate the design of actionable policies in protracted large-scale displacement contexts.