Not A Tabula Rasa: A Historical and Critical Look Into the Migration Policies Of Turkey

Scholarship on Turkish migration and asylum policy usually begins in the recent past. It treats the 1999 candidacy for European Union membership, the Syrian war after 2011 and the 2016 EU-Turkey Statement as the forces that produced the present regime. This thesis begins earlier. It argues that Turkey's migration and asylum architecture rests on more than six centuries of administrative practice, and that these earlier practices still organise how the state classifies, moves and settles people. The overarching question is how long-term Ottoman and Turkish practices of forced displacement, demographic engineering and the securitisation of human mobility have shaped the contemporary architecture of Turkey's migration and asylum regime. By forced displacement the thesis means all human mobility instigated by state authorities, a term chosen to avoid applying categories such as refugee, which acquired their legal meaning only in 1951, to earlier centuries. The study is multidisciplinary, combining legal, historical and political analysis within a diachronic framework (Widdersheim, 2018). Cases are selected across the full period, described in uniform terms and compared to identify trends rather than isolated episodes. The periodisation is threefold: the Ottoman era; the formative years between the 1839 Tanzimat Edict and the 1934 Resettlement Law; and the Republican era. Chapter 2 reconstructs the long development of Ottoman and Turkish policy. Forced relocation secured newly conquered territory, the millet system governed religious communities without requiring assimilation, and the settlement of Muslim refugees answered nineteenth-century territorial loss. The chapter then traces the shift from imperial pragmatism to ethno-nationalist homogenisation through the Medz Yeghern, the compulsory exchange agreed at Lausanne in 1923 and the 1934 Resettlement Law. The techniques persisted; their purpose changed. Chapter 3 develops this into a conceptual account using Abulof's deep securitisation (2014). Reading the Kurdish refugee crisis of 1991, the reform period of 2002-2011 and the response to Syrian displacement, it shows that the apparent opening of the early 2000s did not dislodge existential anxieties about demographic composition and territorial unity. De-securitisation failed because it addressed policy rather than the framing that sustains it. Chapter 4 examines European funding. The Facility for Refugees in Turkey mobilised six billion euros, the first tranche contracted in under two years. Formal convergence with European norms coexisted with restrictive implementation and a widening gap between Syrians and others. Europeanisation was selective: norms of control and deterrence travelled, those concerning rights did not. Chapter 5 follows these patterns to the Evros region and the Aegean, tracing landmines, the 2012 fence, the arrival of FRONTEX, and the practices that followed. Border management there was not a coherent design but the outcome of national politics, enforcement practice, smuggling networks and agency mandates. Recorded deaths track those shifts. The thesis restores historical depth to a field that has treated Turkish policy as reactive and externally driven, demonstrates what long-term multidisciplinary analysis recover, and offers the first systematic application of deep securitisation to migration.