Category: article

ppoints14 - Welcoming Diversity: The Role of Local and Civil Society Initiatives in Integrating Newcomers

Welcoming Diversity: The Role of Local and Civil Society Initiatives in Integrating Newcomers

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by Feyzi Baban, Fuat Kyman, Hane Paker, and Kim Rygiel, 2018.

The question of how to live together with newcomers has become a policy issue of utmost concern.

Issue 14 of the International Migration Research Centre’s Policy Points Series: Welcoming Diversity: The Role of Local and Civil Society Initiatives in Integrating Newcomers

In a global context marked by growing international forced displacement and migration, societies are becoming increasingly more diverse. The question of how to live together with newcomers has become a policy issue of utmost concern. While populist governments in Europe and in the United States are failing to offer citizens and newcomers alternative models for living together that encourage greater ethnic, cultural and religious plurality, in this report we highlight the contributions and lessons drawn from local and civil-society initiatives that have been successful in bringing hosts and newcomers together. By analysing initiatives in Riace, Italy, Gaziantep, Turkey, and Berlin, Germany, we highlight the importance of a three-pronged approached to integration that combines governmental leadership, solid integration policies, and civil-society and locally-based initiatives that allow for personal interchanges between newcomers and hosts.

Secular Spaces and Religious Representations: reading the Headscarf Debate in Turkey as Citizenship Politics

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Baban, F. “Secular Spaces and Religious Representations: reading the Headscarf Debate in Turkey as Citizenship Politics”, Citizenship Studies.
January 10, 2015

We need to identify the wearing of the headscarf as a specific ‘act of citizenship’ that challenges dominant citizenship practices.


Although in recent years there has been a relaxing attitude in Turkey towards wearing headscarf in the public sphere, the controversy surrounding the visibility and use of the headscarf has often been read through modernity/tradition dichotomy which sees the use of headscarf by women as a threat to modernity by religious subjectivities. The principal reason for this reading is that the citizenship regime in Turkey has not been simply about defining a framework of membership to a political community but rather has been used to construct modern subjectivity.

This article attempts to dislocate the headscarf controversy from this dichotomous reading by moving it into the larger framework of citizenship politics. It argues that instead of interpreting the growing visibility of the headscarf within the public sphere that pits modernity against tradition, we need instead to identify the wearing of the headscarf as a specific ‘act of citizenship’ that challenges dominant citizenship practices.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13621025.2013.865900?scroll=top&needAccess=true  

Syrian Refugees in Turkey: Pathways to Precarity, Differential Inclusion and Negotiated Citizenship Rights

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Baban F., Ilcan, S. and Rygiel, K. “Syrian Refugees in Turkey: Pathways to Precarity, Differential Inclusion and Negotiated Citizenship Rights”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, with Kim Rygiel and Suzan Ilcan, published online 8.06.2016. 

Syrians are not only making claims to citizenship rights but they are also negotiating their access to social services, humanitarian assistance, and employment in different ways.

This article addresses the question of how to understand the relation among precarity, differential inclusion, and citizenship status with regard to Syrian refugees in Turkey. Turkey has become host to over 2.7 million Syrian refugees who live in government-run refugee camps and urban centres. Drawing on critical citizenship and migration studies literature, the paper emphasizes the Turkish government’s central legal and policy frameworks that provide Syrians with some citizenship rights while simultaneously regulating their status and situating them in a position of limbo.

Syrians are not only making claims to citizenship rights but they are also negotiating their access to social services, humanitarian assistance, and employment in different ways. The analysis stresses that Syrian refugees in Turkey continue to be part of the multiple pathways to precarity, differential inclusion, and negotiated citizenship rights.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2016.1192996;

Politicizing camps: forging transgressive citizenships in and through transit

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Rygiel, K. Politicizing Camps: Forging Transgressive Citizenships in and through Transit, in: Citizenship Studies 16 (5-6), 2012, pp. 807-825.

Can we think about camps as spaces of politics and citizenship-making?

The proliferation of migrant and refugee camps for governing populations challenges the contemporary politics of citizenship. This article explores the camp as a question of citizenship. How do camp spaces enable the reproduction of certain spaces as the proper sites of politics and the constitution of some subjects and not others as the proper political subjects of citizenship? Can we think about camps as spaces of politics and citizenship-making? Situating the camp within the context of the historical emergence of extraterritoriality in relation to citizenship, I argue that camps reproduce orientalist mappings of the world that deem some people incapable or unworthy of citizenship. Rather than a space of exceptionality, outside of and separate from the space of the citizen, the article investigates the camp as both a political and politicized space, in which artists, activists and migrants use the camp as a site of building de-orientalizing cartographies to politicize migrant rights and political subjectivities.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2012.698511

Introduction: The Contentious Politics of Refugee and Migrant Protest and Solidarity Movements: Remaking Citizenship from the Margins

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This special issue inquires into their transformative possibilities and offers a collection of articles that explore political mobilizations in several countries and (border) regions, including Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Austria, Germany, Greece, Turkey and ‘the Mediterranean.’

Ataç, I., Rygiel, K. and M. Stierl.  2016. “Introduction: the contentious politics of refugee and migrant protest and solidarity movements: remaking citizenship from the margins”, Citizenship Studies 20 (10): 1-18.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2016.1182681

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Rygiel, K. 2016. “Dying to Live: Migrant Deaths and Citizenship Politics along the European Border.” Citizenship Studies 20 (10): 1-16.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2016.1182682

Throughout the world, political mobilizations by refugees, irregularized migrants, and solidarity activists have emerged, demanding and enacting the right to move and to stay, struggling for citizenship and human rights, and protesting the violence and deadliness of contemporary border regimes. These struggles regularly traverse the local and constitute trans-border, trans-categorical, and in fact, social movements.

This issue brings into dialog social movement literature, and especially the ‘contentious politics’ perspective, with migration struggles. It connects these to current debates underway within Critical Citizenship Studies and the Autonomy of Migration literatures around rights making, the constitution of political subjectivities, and re-defining notions of the political and political community.

Migrants and refugees continue to die as they attempt to cross into Europe. This article explores the issue of ‘dying to live’ to draw attention to the disturbing fact of these deaths in relation to the state, biopolitics, and citizenship, but also to the growing mobilization around refugee and migrant deaths along European borders. The article examines transnational activism in solidarity with migrants, refugees and their families in response to deaths at Europe’s borders as one example of the many political struggles for greater rights undertaken by refugees, migrants, and solidarity activists emerging across Europe and elsewhere. An examination of struggles around rights of the dead and in response to migrant and refugee deaths suggests that they can be transgressive of the logic of modern citizenship.

Snapshots from the margins: Transgressive cosmopolitanisms in Europe

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Feyzi Baban, Kim Rygiel

First Published February 17, 2014 , European Journal of Social Theory  Volume  17, issue 4,  2014

Abstract

Right-wing parties and governments in Europe have recently expressed greater hostility towards cultural pluralism, at times officially denunciating multiculturalism, and calling for the closure of borders and denial of rights to non-European nationals. Within this context, this article argues for rethinking Europe through radically transgressive and transnational understandings of cosmopolitanism as articulated by growing transnational populations within Europe such as immigrants, refugees, and irregular migrants. Transgressive forms of cosmopolitanism disrupt European notions of borders and identities in ways that challenge both liberal multiculturalism and assimilationist positions.

This article explores the limits of traditional cosmopolitan thinking while offering a vision of cosmopolitanism based on everyday negotiations with cultural differences, explained using two illustrative examples or snapshots.

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A Year after “The Cologne Attacks”: How Small Community Initiatives in Europe Are Countering Right-wing Populism

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By Feyzi Baban and Kim Rygiel

The question we need to ask is this: Why do some people and communities express discomfort and hostility towards others of different cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds while others show openness and solidarity with newcomers such as refugees?

The one-year anniversary of the “Cologne attacks” on some 1,200 women on New Year’s Eve is a difficult one for many Germans. Prior to the attacks, since the summer of 2015, Germany demonstrated remarkable leadership – unlike many other European countries – by providing refuge to a million people fleeing war in places like Syria, where nearly half the population fled their homes. Last year’s attacks, most of which took place in the Cologne train station and included sexual assault, rape and robbery, were a tipping and turning point for many Germans.

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showCoverImage 1 - Living with others: fostering radical cosmopolitanism through citizenship politics in Berlin

Living with others: fostering radical cosmopolitanism through citizenship politics in Berlin

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by Feyzi Baban and Kim Rygiel, 2017


This is a form of cosmopolitanism that rejects the citizen/non-citizen binary, establishing relationships that instead transcend hierarchical boundaries between insider and outside.

A growing refugee and migration crisis has imploded on European shores, immobilizing E.U. countries and fueling a rise in far-right parties. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates the question of how to foster pluralism and a cosmopolitan desire for living with others who are newcomers. By looking at Berlin, Germany, the paper investigates community-based, citizen-led initiatives that open communities to newcomers, such as refugees and migrants, and foster cultural pluralism in ways that transform understandings of who is a citizen and belongs to the community.

This paper brings insights from critical citizenship studies, exploring how citizenship is constituted through everyday practices, into dialogue with radical cosmopolitanism, particularly through Derrida’s works on ‘unconditional hospitality’.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/16544951.2017.1391650