Title: Border mobility, state power, and war: refugees' experiences of crossing the Turkish-Syrian border

Authors: Özge Biner

Addresses: Collège de France, Chair Migrations and Societies, 3 rue d'Ulm 75005 Paris, France

Abstract: Since the armed conflict in Syria, the Turkish state has reinforced its authority over the mobility of people with the goal of conditioning and benefiting from cross-border mobility. Depending on the transnational dynamics and the political economy of the war, the Turkish state has adopted different strategies, technologies, and protocols to govern cross-border movements. These processes have generated performative encounters and fluid relations among state agents, non-state armed actors, smugglers, and border crossers. For those who cross the border, these encounters determine their subject position vis-à-vis state power. Based on six years of ethnographic inquiry conducted on the Turkish-Syrian border (2016-2022), I explore the political meaning of cross-border mobility by focusing on the experiences of Syrian refugees and analysing the logics and practices of human mobility governance and its relationship to the spatial concentration of state power across the border.

Keywords: human mobility; human smuggling; border crossing experiences; Syrian refugees; Syrian war; Turkey; border.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2024.145444

International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 2024 Vol.8 No.3/4, pp.323 - 338

Received: 21 Apr 2023
Accepted: 27 May 2024
Published online: 01 Apr 2025 *

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