Publication:
Street-level justifications': service providers mediating refugee reception in the urban context of Istanbul

dc.contributor.departmentDepartment of International Relations
dc.contributor.schoolcollegeinstituteCollege of Administrative Sciences and Economics
dc.date.accessioned2024-11-09T23:10:19Z
dc.date.issued2022
dc.description.abstractThis article discusses the mediating role of service providers between citizens and refugee reception policies. Based on an analysis of interviews with local government officials and NGO workers and observations in two districts of Istanbul, I examine the 'street-level justifications' that service providers use to counter anti-refugee resentments expressed by the citizens. The article suggests that as street-level bureaucrats endeavour to justify their work with refugees through three types discursive strategies; cultural similarity, call for empathy, and pragmatic explanations. Such strategies by constantly re-defining us and them, bear implications for social cohesion. The article offers a meso-level analysis of refugee reception policies in the Turkish context and highlights the limits of initial hospitality. The findings have wider implications for other contexts where the settlement of displaced or migrant populations is rather nascent, policies are top-down and where bureaucratic structures mediate among displaced populations, citizens, and the resources available to them.
dc.description.indexedbyWOS
dc.description.indexedbyScopus
dc.description.issue1
dc.description.openaccessNO
dc.description.publisherscopeInternational
dc.description.sponsoredbyTubitakEuN/A
dc.description.sponsorshipKoc University Seed Fund Program The author is grateful to Koc University Seed Fund Program for funding the larger research project entitled 'Refugees and Local Integration'. The fieldwork for this project was conducted by the author herself. The earlier versions of this paper were presented in conferences such as IMISCOE Annual Conference 2017 and EASA conference in 2018. The author would like to thank field assistants, Abdulhalim Albakkor, Ugur Yildiz, Bal Damla Polat, Emrah Celik and Amal Abdullah who served as reporter and translator during data collection. She would like to thank Didem Danis and Souad Osseiran for their comments on earlier version of this paper, also to Judy Woods for her comments and language editing. The dataset including qualitative interviews and fieldwork notes supporting the results of this article are not publicly available due to data protection issues.
dc.description.volume35
dc.identifier.doi10.1093/jrs/feaa061
dc.identifier.eissn1471-6925
dc.identifier.issn0951-6328
dc.identifier.quartileQ1
dc.identifier.scopus2-s2.0-85127971095
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feaa061
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/9456
dc.identifier.wos773013300005
dc.keywordsStreet-level bureaucracy
dc.keywordsLocal governance
dc.keywordsSyrian refugees
dc.keywordsTurkey
dc.keywordsRefugee reception
dc.keywordsService providers
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherOxford Univ Press
dc.relation.ispartofJournal of Refugee Studies
dc.subjectDemography
dc.subjectMinorities, study and teaching
dc.titleStreet-level justifications': service providers mediating refugee reception in the urban context of Istanbul
dc.typeJournal Article
dspace.entity.typePublication
local.contributor.kuauthorÜstübici, Ayşen
local.publication.orgunit1College of Administrative Sciences and Economics
local.publication.orgunit2Department of International Relations
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relation.isParentOrgUnitOfPublication972aa199-81e2-499f-908e-6fa3deca434a
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