Forced Migration and Protection: Turkey’s Domestic Responses to the Syrian Refugees

Abstract

This article investigates how Turkey implements its responsibilities of an international refugee protection regime at policy level, and it focuses specifically on empirical scholarship about the domestic responses to Syrian refugees. While refugee protection draws on the principles of humanitarianism and non-refoulement in general, how it is understood and delivered is complex and situation-specific. In the exponentially growing literature on Syrian refugees in Turkey, the scholarship often takes for granted the policy responses without highlighting their relations with practices. With situational analysis of the secondary documents, this article introduces refugee protection policies and regulations and makes an analysis of domestic responses in different fields concerning Syrian refugees. This critical appraisal finds that Turkey’s responses mostly include humanitarian social protection and lack rights-based legal protection. This pushes Syrian refugees into exploitative situations.