Understanding Turkey’s Policy Towards Refugees: Unpacking Local Politics

The ongoing war in Syria has forced more than five million people to flee their homes and seek asylum in the neighbouring countries, while over six million people remain displaced within Syria. The mass inflow of Syrian refugees has created fundamental policy challenges for the neighbouring host countries, namely how to ensure ongoing protection with overwhelmed response capacities. The proposed paper argues that local level of governance matters for refugee protection. In order to explain responses to refugees, it is crucial to understand politics beyond the capital cities of host countries and to examine variation in responses at the local level. With this objective, the paper intends to unpack the local politics of the response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey by examining three local contexts: Gaziantep, Adana and Izmir. In each province, as the principal agents of the central government, governors are responsible for effective implementation of central-level policies towards refugees. The municipalities, on the other hand, have adopted relatively more inclusive or restrictive policies. While some municipalities have set up mechanisms to encourage refugees’ active participation in local politics, such as refugee assemblies, some do not offer any direct support to refugees. The paper focuses on the role of municipalities in each province and examines the main sets of factors that appear to determine this variation, such as party politics, identity and interests, but also the personalities of individual heads of municipal authorities. It presents qualitative data from fieldwork, mainly findings from expert-interviews conducted in each province during 2016 and 2017.