Scales of dispossession: policing the threshold of Syrian lives in Istanbul

This thesis offers a critical mixed-method account of a few Syrian migrant friends living in Istanbul in the last decade. From their gaze I situate Istanbul within a loose carceral landscape, at once grounded within the city streets and situated within a wider geographical arc, encompassing European asylum policies and the Turkish government’s occupation of North Syria. I examine their lives through foregrounding three frames in Istanbul – the policing of space and legal categorisations, the practices of property relations, and the situated Syrian tourist worker. Through close ethnographic engagement with their lives, combined with interviews with journalists, lawyers and human rights workers, critical discourse analysis of newspaper reports, and historical analysis, I analyse each frame as sets of practices and relations which are entangled in wider geographical and temporal scales. I deploy two central concepts in order to critically interrogate these further – dispossession and carcerality – and draw out the multiplicity of power, working across disciplinary, biopolitical, spatial and sovereign registers, through which they operate. Drawing on theories of political belonging, urban space, bordering, black and feminist geography, and racialisation, this thesis is an attempt to map some of the contours through which the figure of “the migrant” is being produced, criminalised and punished across multiple scales, grounded in the streets of Istanbul.