Turkey is today home to more than two million refugees of the ongoing war in Syria. Turkey’s ‘open-door’ policy towards Syrians fleeing their country has made it, along with Jordan and Lebanon, one of the major countries in the region receiving Syrian refugees. While an estimated 10% percent of these live in refugee camps in Turkey’s southern border regions, approximately 90% live outside the camps, where they seek accommodation and work in Turkey’s cities. However, while the Turkish government has recognised the Syrian war as a humanitarian crisis, it has been unprepared for the length of the war or the magnitude of the flight. Early estimates in 2011 had put the number of refugees expected to cross the border at around 100,000. While in March 2013, the number of Syrian refugees in Turkey was estimated at less than 250,000, and many of these were located in the 22 ‘guest camps’, the rise of the Islamic State in Syria’s north caused a massive exodus that within two years multiplied that number by more than ten. The scale of the crisis has left government agencies and institutions searching for new plans and policies in relation to a problem that is likely to remain for the indefinite future.
The project aims at assessing the needs of youth whose status is shifting from refugee to immigrant as a result of the prolonged conflict, and at developing concrete organisational and policy suggestions for social and economic integration. Almost all field studies indicate that as the war continues, Syrian citizens in Turkey are being transformed from temporary refugees to permanent immigrants, investing and planning for a future in this neighboring country. The research will specifically focus on one of the most vulnerable groups within the refugee population: youth whose futures are being put on hold. Children below the age of eighteen constitute approximately half of the refugee population. We will focus on the group between 15 and 30 years of age, a time when one would ordinarily be planning for the future, including transition from education to labour market, marrying and building a family. Many in this age group would have attended university and started a professional career in Syria. The project will assess their backgrounds, including educational level and skills; their educational, work, and health needs; and their visions of the future. Outputs of the project will include a gender-based analysis of refugee youth needs in terms of education, labour market and health; a mapping of the institutions that youth use to access opportunities; and concrete recommendations for harnessing the human capital represented by youth in Turkey and for burden-sharing in Europe.
Background on Syrian conflict and refugee flows to Turkey
Not long after the beginning of the Syrian conflict in 2011, Turkey announced an ‘open door’ policy regarding persons attempting to escape the violence. At the time, the Turkish government constructed camps in the southern border regions and anticipated that the tens of thousands of displaced persons who flowed across the border in those early days would eventually return to their homes. Today, while around 230,000 refugees remain in the camps, approximately 2 million live outside them, scattered throughout Turkey’s western and southern cities.
Although Turkey currently hosts more Syrian refugees than any country in the world, this is not the first time that Turkey is facing a mass influx of refugees into its territories. Between 1923 and 1997, as part of its state-building process, Turkey accepted more than 1.6 million refugees considered to be of Turkish descent, mostly from Balkan countries (İhlamur-Öner 2013). The difference in Turkey’s treatment of refugees considered ‘ethnic kin’ and others became clear in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The country experienced influxes of almost 350,000 refugees from Bulgaria in 1989, over a million Iranians after 1979, and up to 500,000 people from Northern Iraq in 1991. While Bulgarians were considered to be of ‘Turkish descent and culture’ (soydaş) and were given citizenship under Turkey’s Settlement Law, the Turkish government was reluctant to open its borders to Kurds in 1991 and did so only as a result of UN Resolution 688, which created safe zones for Kurdish refugees (ibid.). Most Iranian migrants have been given refugee status according to international norms, allowing them to remain in Turkey temporarily while awaiting resettlement in a third country. All of these migration waves are still very much ingrained in Turkey’s collective memory and influence the ways that the public responds to the current refugee crisis. Moreover, despite Turkey’s role as a recipient of mass refugee influxes throughout the twentieth century, in comparison to other countries of its size and importance it lacks significant expertise in the areas of migration, refuge, asylum, and integration.
The Syrian refugee emergency has compelled the Turkish state to rethink its system of refugee protection, especially as the crisis becomes protracted and it becomes more and more clear that Turkey will be responsible not only for temporary protection but also for finding durable solutions. Under Turkish law, Syrian refugees were initially only ‘guests’ rather than ‘refugees’. Turkey’s signature on the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees recognised as refugees only those persons fleeing from events in Europe. Refugee camps in the country’s south were initially labeled ‘guest camps’, while the disadvantage of ‘guest’ status is that one does not have the legal and political protections that would otherwise be provided to refugees. Syrian refugees have been dependent on the state’s ‘generosity’ rather than being viewed as persons with rights.
The Law on Foreigners and International Protection came into force in April 2014, granting ‘temporary protection’ status to ‘foreigners who have been forced to leave their country, cannot return to the country that they have left, and have arrived at or crossed the borders of Turkey in a mass influx situation seeking immediate and temporary protection.’[1] This temporary status has provided Syrians in the country with basic rights such as access to health, education, and social assistance, although refugees continue to face challenges in access to those rights. For instance, Syrians are not able to gain work permits that would allow them to be legally employed in Turkey. This means that access to formal labour markets is one of the main immediate integration challenges, forcing the government to consider legal changes that have not yet been implemented.
The liminal status of Syrian refugees in Turkey has led tens of thousands to seek passage to Europe. Initial research indicates that the majority of people taking the dangerous journey to Europe are young people. The first survey conducted with arriving migrants in Germany shows that of the almost 1000 Syrian refugees interviewed, most were young males, more than 90% of whom said that armed fighting in Syria was a threat to their safety and that they feared conscription or kidnapping by one of the various organisations involved in the fighting. We know, then, that youth make up the largest number of persons on the move. Despite this, however, research focused specifically on refugee youth and their experiences and needs is sparse (for similar observations, see Chatty 2007). Some limited research has addressed migrant youth perceptions of time and the future (e.g., Alssopp, Chase, and Mitchell 2014; Andersson 2014), especially in relation to immigration regimes. Other qualitative research has examined youth agency, particularly the experience of illegality or lack of documentation in the transition to adulthood (esp. Gonzales 2011). However, the experience of stalled temporality, an impeded transition to adulthood, and the impediments of immigration regimes experienced so keenly by many refugee youth is an area still in need of much qualitative research.
Moreover, much of what refugee youth experience arises from their legal and social status as ‘temporary’ refugees. As we know from other cases of prolonged displacement, however, war rarely creates refugees who remain ‘temporary’. Rather, throughout the world, from Afghanistan to Georgia to Uganda, we find millions of persons left in the limbo of ‘permanent temporariness’, often held for decades in the squalor of camps while unable fully to plan for the future (Harrell-Bond 1989). Even in cases where forced migrants return to their homes, as in Bosnia or Rwanda, return is often prolonged, painful, and may entail secondary displacement (e.g., Blitz 2005, Stefansson 2010). In cases of ethnic or secessionist conflict, we see that while return may remain an ideal—e.g., for Georgians displaced from Abkhazia or Greek Cypriots displaced from north Cyprus—the likelihood of return in IDPs’ lifetimes is slim. In the Syrian case, while a regime change could open the door to return, and while a recent study shows that many Syrians in Europe currently desire that,[2] changing work and educational opportunities and life circumstances invariably shift such views as time passes.
In contrast to the international community’s policy of ‘permanent temporariness’ with regard to forced migrants, Turkey is one of the countries that in the first half of the twentieth century successfully absorbed millions of refugees from wars in the Balkans and Caucasus, integrating them into Turkish society and making use of their human capital. This and other historical and comparative cases of mass refugee integration will provide us with examples of successful and unsuccessful practices that may be mined for thinking about the future of Syrians in Turkey.
Aims of the project and research importance
This project aims to assess the well-being and the needs of Syrian youth in Turkey and to show how they may be viewed not as burdensome ‘guests’ but as human capital that can contribute to the country’s development. Our approach is both global and historically informed, as we aim both to formulate effective policy recommendations for burden-sharing at the EU and international levels and also to examine best and worst practices from Turkey’s own recent past that will help us in thinking about local and culturally specific recommendations for integration practices that would enhance the well-being of Syrian youth.
The project will aim to make urgent, medium-term, and longer-term interventions in the issue of Syrian youth integration. We will make urgent interventions through early and frequent announcements of our research results in collaboration with government agencies, NGOs and civil society organisations. We will make medium-term interventions that will include policy recommendations and workshops at both the national, EU, and global levels. Medium-term interventions will include workshops and collaborations with universities and NGOs working in neighbouring refugee-receiving countries. They will also include policy briefings for EU and UN policymakers. The latter will be facilitated by the LSE’s European Institute, one of Europe’s leading centres for EU study, and Institute for Global Affairs, which has recently announced a Global Migration Initiative that will be advised by Peter Sutherland, the UN Secretary General Special Representative for Migration.
This research is urgent, because the future of hundreds of thousands of Syrian youth is currently in danger. While a number of studies have attempted to assess integration problems and have warned of the immanent dangers of leaving them unaddressed (Kirişçi and Ferris 2015; İçduygu 2015; Orhan and Şenyücel 2015), no study to date has systematically examined the critical age group that is transitioning from childhood to adulthood and currently making decisions that will shape their futures. This will also be the group that will play a critical role in decisions about return to the home country in future years.
The project responds to a research gap regarding this humanitarian crisis, because the urgency and lack of data has so far dictated quick responses regarding populations that are constantly changing and whose needs are shifting. The thirty-month period of the RCUK-TÜBİTAK grant will provide research teams from two leading universities the opportunity systematically to collect and analyse data on the crisis and examine how those results may change over time, hence providing a base of reliable research data.
[1] Law on Foreigners and International Protection, Article 91.(unofficial translation)
[2] Listen to Syrians, survey conducted by Berlin Social Science Center, results available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WYn4N7STdP2eW3EYdX86Gsb6lxE4VrcNvZ4aEczsFwI/edit?pli=1#gid=833561282