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.
