This article is part of the blog series “Who, What, and How Much Does Temporary Protection Protect?” and edited by Ibrahim Soysüren. It builds on presentations from a workshop which had the same title and held on 9 December 2023 in Izmir and jointly organised by the NCCR On the Move, the Institute of Sociology of the University of Neuchâtel, and the Izmir Bar Association.
In this last post in our blog series, İbrahim Soysüren looks at temporary protection through the some trends of migration management in Turkey, including both continuity and discontinuity. He argues that the temporary protection symbolises a move away from the Geneva Convention, which is rights-based and obliges states to provide durable solutions for refugees. It also underlines that the permanence of the temporary protection paves the way for problems that are unpredictable and difficult to manage.
Temporary protection Through the Continuity and Discontinuity of Migration Management in Turkey
İbrahim Soysüren*
This is the last post in a blog series that have been published over the last three months on various aspects of temporary protection. Each post was written and can be read as “single and free like a tree“, as in Nazım Hikmet’s famous poem. On the other hand, the authors wrote them knowing that they would be part of a small group of trees, if not a “forest“. The main purpose of the meeting that inspired the series can be summarised as follows: to provide a modest contribution to the ongoing debate on temporary protection.
As we began our work, the Temporary Protection Regulation, one of the fundamental texts governing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Turkey, was entering its tenth year of implementation. Meanwhile, with the discussions on the return of Syrian refugees being triggered by the fall of the regime in Syria, other reasons to reflect on temporary protection have emerged. In selecting the posts for the series, the aim was to address different aspects of temporary protection in Turkey, as well as regulations and practices at the international level and in different countries.
Why temporary protection?
The aim of this blogpost is to question the need for temporary protection as an instrument of migration management and to highlight the unpredictable problems it creates. While thinking about or working on the temporary protection regime, the problems it poses, especially uncertainty, and the necessity for sustainable solutions have been frequently highlighted in various blogposts in this series and in other publications.
It is important to “go back to the beginning” when trying to understand temporary protection with reference to the case of Turkey. Much has been said about the government’s discourse of “religious brotherhood” and its ambitions and dreams regarding the civil war in Syria. From this perspective, the introduction of temporary protection can be seen as an acknowledgment or a sign that the presence of Syrians in Turkey will not be temporary. It should be noted that the civil war in Syria started in 2011, and the temporary protection regulation was implemented almost three years later. Statistics show that the number of Syrians in Turkey in 2014 was around 1.5 million. The regulation refers to “foreigners arriving or crossing our borders en masse“. It defines these people as “those whose application for international protection cannot be assessed individually”. Temporary protection is therefore an attempt to manage a situation that could slip out of control. On the other hand, it is also possible to see what has happened as a circumvention of the Law on Foreigners and International Protection, which regulates migration and asylum, only months after its entry into force in April 2014.
In this context, I would like to highlight the established practices behind this choice for a legal form that is less legally binding and easier to change. I am referring to the way in which migration and foreigners are managed by means of regulations or circulars (some of which are kept secret) that give the administration a very wide margin of manoeuvre. In a way, this is a situation in which the old habits of the police are reproduced or maintained by the newly established “civil” administration.
How to understand the return to the old while implementing the new?
To better understand temporary protection, it is first necessary to place it in the context of the continuities and discontinuities of migration management. In this regard, the adoption of the Law on Foreigners and International Protection and the establishment of the General Directorate of Migration Management can be considered as a historical discontinuity with the past. This was a significant change for an area that, since the Ottoman Empire, had been managed by the police with (or without) regulations of dubious legality. However, it was precisely during this period, in relation to the presence and management of the largest migrant community in the country, that the temporary protection regime was put into practice with a directive that granted very broad powers to the administration, in accordance with an established reflex. Consequently, while a so-called ‘civil’ migration management organisation, created on the basis of a specific legal framework and considered as a discontinuity, had been implemented, a situation of recourse to the past emerged. Upon retrospection, it becomes evident that this was indicative of the fact that the long-standing management approach was not to be forsaken. Consequently, the implementation of temporary protection can be regarded as a phenomenon in which established management practices were reproduced, concurrently with a historical shift in the governance of migration.
With the dynamics of continuity and discontinuity in mind, one can refer to the concept proposed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault governmentality (gouvernementalité). According to one of definitions, governmentality is “the encounter between techniques of domination exercised over others and techniques specific to the individual”. The former “determine the behaviour of individuals, subjecting them to certain ends or domination, objectifying the subject”. The latter, on the other hand, lead to “a certain number of operations carried out by individuals, alone or with the help of others, on their bodies and souls, their thoughts, their behaviour, their way of being” (Foucault, 1994b: 785). They therefore force individuals to conform to the requirements by power.
From this point of view, temporary protection is a flexible regulation and practice that allows the authorities to act arbitrarily. On the other hand, it forces the refugees to meekly accept the “fate” that has been envisaged for them. It also presupposes that they must behave as expected, i.e. not ask for new rights, a more secure status or a permanent solution.
Unpredictable problems due to permanent temporariness
One of the most important issues to be considered in the implementation of temporary protection in Turkey is the rejection of permanent or sustainable solutions. Moreover, the passage of time has turned the initial rejection into an impossibility. At the political level, even the mere consideration of such solutions can provoke negative reactions. In this context, it is necessary to point out the increasingly evident trend away from the approach that sees refugees as persons with rights and states as institutions which are obliged to provide rights-based sustainable solutions, as embodied in the 1951 Geneva Convention. As a symbol and instrument of this tendency, temporary protection finds its place more easily in legal approaches and practices that are in line with the spirit of the neoliberal era, which increasingly favours authoritarianism and reinforces precarity.
Despite the convenience it offers to administration in migration management, it should be stressed that temporary protection has in fact begun to create unforeseen problems as it has been extended over many years. We conducted in Izmir the Turkish part of our comparative research project entitled “Dealing with Crises and Liminal Situations: The Agency of Ukrainian and Syrian Forced Migrants in Three National Context“. During this fieldwork, and particularly during our interviews with representatives of civil society organisations and legal professionals, the sentence ‘They have become locals’ with regard to Syrians was frequently used. It was employed to refer to people who could lose their status at any moment and be sent back to Syria. “They” were seen as “locals” through observation of social reality, but it was also clear that people were talking about a “local” from which refugees could be sent away at any moment. Indeed, when the regime in Syria collapsed, the first thing that came to most people’s minds was ‘They should go back’.
Furthermore, it is imperative to acknowledge that the provision of temporary protection may, in certain situations, result in cases that could be categorised as statelessness, particularly in relation to children and young individuals born in Turkey, whose number is estimated to be in the tens of thousands. The legal status of these individuals is precarious, contingent on a status that is subject to revocation at any time. Moreover, the state of Syria, from which their parents come, remains unaware of their existence. An examination of the children of families who have opted to remain in Turkey despite the revocation of their temporary protection status reveals that they are, in effect, living without legal recognition, or are at least invisible. Furthermore, it is crucial to acknowledge that some of them were likely already stateless in Syria. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, a growing number of people do not even have the right to have rights.
Wrapping up
As I pointed out above, we began by asking the following question, which is actually more than one question: Who, what and how much does temporary protection protect? If the twelve blog posts in this series have convinced the reader that it is important to ask the question being discussed, and if they have made the reader think more about it, this mean that the goal of this collective effort, which has taken several months, has been achieved to some extent.
Finally, I would like to stress that understanding and reflecting on temporary protection and its implementation does not mean being interested in an issue related to “others”. The “story” of our shared life is incomplete if we do not understand it. Therefore, it is also your story. De te fabula narratur.
*Dr İbrahim Soysüren, a lawyer and sociologist, is a senior researcher at the University of Neuchâtel.
** The ideas and opinions expressed in GAR Blog publications are those of the authors; they do not reflect those of the Association for Migration Research.
*** The image created by ChatGPT.
