Beste İşleyen’s research while affiliated with University of Amsterdam and other places

The evolution of refugee humanitarianism is commonly studied in terms of critical junctures. One such historical moment is the creation of a ‘safe zone’ for Iraqi Kurdish refugees above the 36th parallel of Northern Iraq through the 1991 United Nations (UN) mission known as ‘Operation Provide Comfort.’ The UN intervention is widely accepted as a critical juncture because it marked the beginning of international humanitarianism's extra-territorial phase. ‘Operation Provide Comfort’ brought a paradigm shift in the management of displaced populations by means of introducing “preventive protection” as a novel approach combining protection with control as the idea is to keep refugees in their own countries and offer them help without the need to cross an international border. The standard narrative underlines Western historical priority by attributing the preventive protection to a single source of ideas and processes stemming from the West. Drawing on postcolonial research, this paper argues for recognizing the agency of the non-West in the formulation and execution of the safe haven concept as a historical milestone. More specifically, it demonstrates the pioneering role that Turkey played through international debates and diplomatic action, which culminated into the new episode of refugee humanitarianism. The findings also invite us to revisit current explanations of the evolution of international humanitarian norms by showing the entanglement of refugee protection on the one hand, and domestic and regional questions of ethnicity and counter-insurgency on the other.

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.

These interventions reflect critically on current approaches to externalisation and identify new avenues for research. While recognising the importance of paying continued attention to practices associated with externalisation, they point out some of the limits that may derive from an uncritical focus on the issue, as well as some aspects that remain under-researched. To begin with, research on externalisation has long been marked by presentism. Only recently have scholars started paying attention to (post-)colonial logics and trajectories, and to continuities and ruptures between externalisation and previous political spatial formations such as empires and colonies. The first intervention (Casas-Cortés, Cobarrubias and Lemberg-Pedersen) reminds us of the hidden histories of what we now call externalisation. Historical inquiry helps repoliticise migration policies and see the evolution of border externalisation as more than just a recent response to challenges posed to states by unwanted migration. However, an acritical post-colonial approach may end up reproducing a certain Eurocentrism or methodological Europeanism, which has long affected research on externalisation. The second intervention (El Qadim and İşleyen) shows that such an approach may obscure the fact that present-day migration and border dynamics are determined not only by the ‘centre’ (wealthy European countries), which externalises its migration-related narratives, policies and practices to the ‘margins’, but also from those very ‘margins’, or so-called countries of origin and transit. To avoid unidirectional readings, research on externalisation should closely engage with the centre-margin logic and question the origin-transit-destination relationship. The idea of ‘externalisation’ also assumes a state-centric perspective. The third intervention (Cuttitta, Fine, Giusa and Heller) points out the need to limit the state-centric bias that predominates – if, to some extent, inevitably – research on externalisation. The authors suggest embedding externalisation in the ambivalent and conflictual dynamics resulting from a networked multiplicity of actors. They interrogate the relationship between externalisation and migration management and suggest that studies on externalisation could benefit from engaging with assemblage theory. The discussion on the multiplicity of non-state actors, who do not possess territories defining an inside and outside, opens up spaces of critical reflection on a further dichotomy: that between the very categories of interior and exterior. The last intervention (Cuttitta, Heller and Lemberg-Pedersen) suggests embedding externalisation into the wider context of the present global order, where no clear-cut division can be drawn between the territorially based ideas of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ on which the very concept of externalisation rests, as sovereignty is diversified in its multiple state and non-state, territorial and non-territorial manifestations. Thus, these interventions engage with ongoing debates in the broader fields of migration and border studies about seeking to avoid ahistorical accounts, de-centring research perspectives, researching migration regimes as multi-actor enactments beyond the state, and thinking borders as complex spatial articulations.

This article studies practices of knowledge production during counterterrorism financing court cases in European courts. Developments in international law have contributed to novel regulations to criminalise and prosecute the funding of terrorism in advance of terrorist violence. In this study, we study how court cases have become important spaces for contesting and evaluating multiple knowledge claims on terrorist threat and suspicion by analysing case proceedings from both the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Building on recent debates in International Relations and postcolonial theory, we make two contributions. First, building on insights from postcolonial literature on ‘abyssal thinking’, we illustrate how legal practices differentiate between different ways of knowing by dismissing certain experiences as ‘emotional’ or ‘subjective’ in contrast to the assumed objectivity of other knowledge claims. We argue that decisions on what counts as knowledge in a court setting are situated in a specific sociopolitical setting, whereby particular knowledge and life-worlds are recognised at the expense of others. Second, we empirically show how the novel criminal laws shifts the responsibility to know terrorist threat from the state to ordinary citizens. We illustrate how the court reinforces new security logics where the state can entertain doubt, uncertainty, and trust in their practices, while the citizens cannot.

How does territorial change occur in conflict settings without a radical transformation of state interests and international norms? Territorial change is understood here as the unfolding of nonconflictual territorial visions, actions, and interactions in the absence of sovereignty transfer and/or transformation of the existing status of a disputed territory. This article addresses the question of territorial change in conflict settings by examining Turkey's coastal radar technology as an evolving border security infrastructure in the Aegean Sea. Entailing remotely controlled unmanned stations, mobile vehicles, and drones, Turkey's radar technology generates territorial change. Rather than merely enabling or constraining territorial engagement, technology actively produces territory by transforming it into a nonconflictual state. The altering of territory is achieved by the realignment of security conditioned by and functionally dependent on technology. Radar technology mediates Aegean security in ways that are different from its conventional external-oriented framework targeting another sovereign state. Yet, far from moving away from militarization, radar technology produces irregular migration as a new referent of militarized border security, while simultaneously bringing civilian actors to the fore. Territorial change materializes as technology alters the directionality of territorial vision, transforms “seeing” into “visualization,” and makes possible new types of sovereign violence.

This article examines youth entrepreneurship in Jordan in the context of the country's neoliberal reforms. Drawing on Foucauldian scholarship on neoliberal governmentality and the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism, we argue that youth empowerment is part of the Jordanian regime's strategy of subject formation along neoliberal lines through the dissemination of market ideas of competitiveness, enterprise society and self-responsibility. The article presents new empirical material that includes interviews conducted in Jordan and Egypt and highlights how the King's two initiatives display a win-win relationship for the regime and the youth alike without necessarily challenging the status quo.

Reading Reece Jones’s Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. 224 pages, Verso, New York and London (2017), p. £16.99 (hardback), ISBN: 9781784784713 - - Book Review Forum, Published online in Political Geography Journal - 6th January 2020 - access to published version: - - [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102129] - This forum is around Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones, the winning volume of the first edition of the biennial book award of the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographic Society with IBG (PolGRG) in conjunction with Political Geography Journal. The book award was established in 2016 to give recognition to new academic volumes that engage with the thematic remit of PolGRG and contribute to develop the diverse field of political geography more widely. In line with the diversity of PolGRG interests and membership, the PolGRG Book Award is aimed at published volumes advancing the debate around themes spanning territoriality and sovereignty; states, cities, and citizenship; geopolitics, political economy and political ecology; migration, globalization and (post)colonialism; social movements and governance; peace, conflict and security. All this appreciating the implications of these phenomena with gender, race, class, sexuality and religion.

This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically the border and migration policies they implement or resist. A proliferating interest in the discursive and non-discursive materialisation of moral and ethical elements in asylum and migration policies has examined the intertwinement of care and control logics underlying the management of refugee camps, borders and borderzones, and hotspots alongside the deployment of search-and-rescue operations. Nevertheless, recent research has shown the need to unpack narratives and actions displaying values and symbols that are not necessarily encompassed within this intertwinement of compassion and repression. We argue that there is a need to pay more attention to the diversity, plurality and the operation of morality, ethics and rights in settings and geographies, and of including a diversity of actors both across and beyond EUrope - please request full text if your institution does not provide access