Migrant integration in Turkey: Travels of a concept across borders and domains of knowledge production
Citation
Yükseker, Deniz; Çeler, Zafer. Migrant integration in Turkey: Travels of a concept across borders and domains of knowledge production. Migration Studies (2024). 1-17.Abstract
In Turkey, the concept of migrant integration has risen to prominence in both academic and policy
fields following the arrival of Syrian refugees. In this article, we first trace the resurgence of migrant in tegration studies in Western Europe in the past two decades following the decline of the discourse on
multiculturalism. We argue that the policy concept of migrant integration has travelled to Turkey as
part of the European Union’s (EU) externalization of migration management; however, the term has
been reshaped in Turkey through a process of vernacularization as displayed in official documents, pro grams, and projects funded by the EU and other supranational actors, and policy studies. Although the
vernacularized form of integration, named ‘harmonization’, has gained specific connotations in the
Turkish context, this article demonstrates that it still carries assimilationist features, since it cannot go
beyond the limits of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, and cannot escape from the
binary opposition of native citizens and migrants. The article elucidates how knowledge production by
governmental institutions, supranational and international organizations, researchers, and the civil soci ety helps legitimate a certain understanding of integration of migrants into the host society that
assumes each group to be homogeneous in terms of socio-economic characteristics and culture, and
which emphasizes Islam as a common denominator between the two.
Source
Migration StudiesURI
https://academic.oup.com/migration/advance-article/doi/10.1093/migration/mnae009/7635398https://doi.org/10.1093/migration/mnae009
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12780/798