Browsing by Author "Karadag, Sibel"

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Citation Count: 1
Engineered Migration at the Greek-Turkish Border: a Spectacle of Violence and Humanitarian Space
(Sage Publications Ltd, 2023) Isleyen, Beste; Karadag, Sibel
In February 2020, Turkey announced that the country would no longer prevent refugees and migrants from crossing into the European Union. The announcement resulted in mass human mobility heading to the Turkish border city of Edirne. Relying on freshly collected data through interviews and field visits, this article argues that the 2020 events were part of a state-led execution of 'engineered migration' through a constellation of actors, technologies and practices. Turkey's performative act of engineered migration created a spectacle in ways that differ from the spectacle's usual materialization at the EU's external borders. By breaking from its earlier role as a partner, the Turkish state engaged in a countermove fundamentally altering the dyadic process through which the spectacle routinely materializes at EU external borders around the hypervisibilization of migrant illegality. Reconceptualizing the spectacle through engineered migration, the article identifies two complementary acts by Turkish actors: the spectacularization of European (Greek) violence and the creation of a humanitarian space to showcase Turkey as the 'benevolent' actor. The article also discusses how the sort of hypervisibility achieved through the spectacle has displaced violence from its points of emergence and creation and becomes the routinized form of border security in Turkey.
Citation Count: 0
Powered by Secrecy: Contesting Imaginaries of Migration Governance in Turkey
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2024) Karadag, Sibel; Tatar, Doruk
In light of a growing body of literature on migration and border governance engaging with the legal and institutional production of heterogenous forms of non-knowledge, this article aims to contribute to this scholarship by attending to the role of secrecy through the case of Turkey. This paper turns the spotlight on the migration governance in Turkey by investigating the ways in which secrecy is perceived, contested, and reconfigured by civil society actors. The article argues that the extensive use of secrecy engenders perceptions that vacillate between two opposing imaginaries: the central migration authority as an incompetent entity and as a security agency with an aura of omnipotence. By drawing on and subverting Luc Boltanski's notion of domination as a reality-stabilising function, we propose that the undecidable nature of the migration governance enables a form of domination hinging on the destabilisation of reality in the eyes of subjects that are paralysed, disarmed, and disabled to cope with the policies in practice.