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Turkey now hosts the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world, more than 3.6 million of the 12.7 million displaced by the Syrian Civil War. Many of them are subject to an unpredictable temporary protection, forcing them to live under vulnerable and insecure conditions.
The Precarious Lives of Syrians examines the three dimensions of the architecture of precarity: Syrian migrants' legal status, the spaces in which they live and work, and their movements within and outside Turkey. The difficulties they face include restricted access to education and healthcare, struggles to secure employment, language barriers, identity-based discrimination, and unlawful deportations. Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan, and Kim Rygiel show that Syrians confront their precarious conditions by engaging in cultural production and community-building activities, and by undertaking perilous journeys to Europe, allowing them to claim spaces and citizenship while asserting their rights to belong, to stay, and to escape. The authors draw on migration policies, legal and scholarly materials, and five years of extensive field research with local, national, and international humanitarian organizations, and with Syrians from all walks of life.
The Precarious Lives of Syrians offers a thoughtful and compelling analysis of migration precarity in our contemporary context.
“This captivating book offers a poignant, scrupulous, and provocative analysis of what Baban, Ilcan and Rygiel call the “architecture of precarity” composed of three layers, namely, precarious status, precarious space, and precarious movement. It provides a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the impact of this “architecture” on the lives of Syrian asylum seekers in Turkey, as well as the way these uprooted people confront exclusions.” Studies in Social Justice
"Turkey hosts the largest refugee community in the world today and the Syrian refugee issue has far-reaching implications across that country. This book, with its succinct overview of Syrian refugees in that country and its vivid description of the socio-economic conditions of refugees in cities and host communities, is a welcome and long overdue effort." Cenk Saraçoglu, Ankara University and author of Kurds of Modern Turkey: Migration, Neoliberalism and Exclusion in Turkish Society
“A vital read – not only for those with an interest in the plight of Syrian refugees, but also for all those concerned about the ‘death of asylum’ as a concept and practice, and the ‘discursive disappearance of the refugee’ or erosion of the idea that people who seek asylum may be refugees. While the authors certainly document a bleak situation for many Syrians in Turkey, they also provide glimpses of strength of Syrians who continue to build their lives in the face of challenges, in solidarity with each other as well as with Turkish citizens.” Journal of Refugee Studies