Cycles of (Im)mobility: Floating Populations in the Case of Turkey

Abstract

As the largest refugee-hosting country in the world, the case of Turkey represents a categorical example that manifests a varied set of legal and governing techniques to monitor millions of displaced people within a broad design of temporality and spatiality. At the intersection of Turkey’s contested gatekeeping role for Europe, an economic downturn, authoritarian rule, and the erosion of the rule of law, the multitude of displaced bodies becomes an instrument of population engineering characterized by remarkable flux. This chapter endeavors to dissect Turkey’s migration regime, revealing a complex legal precarity and temporal lacuna that are distinctly layered. This intricate legal and spatial/temporal architecture is routinely transcended, functioning as a self-failing mechanism aligning with the exigencies of the informal labor market and the prevailing political conjuncture. Consequently, it perpetually begets irregularity and arbitrariness. A set of governing technologies, at times paradoxical, transforms irregularized bodies into floating populations in cycles of (forced) movement. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.