Forced Displacement and Migrations

The study of the nexus between forced displacement and revolution stands at the heart of my doctoral research. I have further developed my research on forced displacement as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project ‘Southern Responses to Syrian Displacement’ (UCL, MRU) and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Migration Research Unit (UCL). In these projects I have explored the relations of Syrians forcefully displaced to  Gaziantep (Turkey) with their hostile environment, precarious everyday and unstable legal status, and also the migratory horizons that develop from living in a spatio-temporal and legal limbo. I have also focused on Syrian civil society’s and humanitarian organisations’ initiatives towards fellow Syrian exiles in Gaziantep. 

Moreover, I have researched Syrian displacement in Gaziantep and analysed hospitality’s failures when it is captured by the Turkish state, which transforms ethical-religious duties into legal obligations (2014-2017). In an article published in 2023 in American Ethnologist, I argue that Syrian ‘guests’ cannot reciprocate state hospitality since they do not belong to the same scale; moreover, they refuse their guest status, claiming to be refugees and wanting to be subjects of law rather than favour. This scalar confusion simultaneously puts Turkish locals in a delicate position, as the rescaling of duty-based hospitality, and state injunction for the locals to be Syrians’ hosts defeats hospitality’s very purpose. The rescaling of hospitality and the confusion of its moral, religious and legal registers, thus alienate local hosts and guests from each other, creating hostility wherein each characterises the other as ‘bad’. Eventually, hospitality’s dead ends lead Syrians to aspire to become refugees, imagine new migratory horizons and follow novel routes to living with dignity.