Bottom-up nationalism and discrimination on social media: An analysis of the citizenship debate about refugees in Turkey

Abstract

This study analyzes social media representations of refugees in Turkey and discusses their role in shaping public opinion. The influx of millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey has created heated debates about their presence and future in the country. One of these debates was triggered by President Erdoğan’s statement that Turkey would issue citizenship rights to Syrians in July 2016. Due to a lack of critical voices about refugee issues in Turkey’s mass media sphere, social media has become a key platform for citizens to voice their opinions. Through a discourse analysis of tweets about the issue of refugees’ citizenship, I will map different perceptions of refugees in Turkey. I argue that despite contesting discourses about Syrians, the debate on social media reinforces nationalism and an ethnocentric understanding of citizenship in Turkey. As the number of refugees and migrants increases rapidly worldwide, they become the new ‘others’ of national imagined communities. Social media becomes a key communication space where the nation is discursively constructed in a bottom-up manner through manifestations of ‘us’ and ‘them’. The analysis shows that social media contributes to trivialization and normalization of discrimination and hatred against Syrian refugees through disseminating overt discourses of ‘Othering’. Social media also enables more covert forms of discrimination through ‘rationalized’ arguments that are used to justify discrimination through the basis of false/non-verified information. Thus, Twitter becomes a space for critical, bottom-up, yet nationalistic and discriminatory statements about refugees.

The politics and poetics of migrant narratives

“…News reports also trigger debate on social media circuits. In this special issue, Çiğdem Bozdağ (2019) explores how people in Turkey circulate social media representations of Syrian refugees on Twitter as a form of bottom-up nationalism, which ‘contributes to the trivialization and normalization of discrimination’ (p. 1).…”

“…It is then the task of the researcher to bring these different, divergent or at times colliding viewpoints together in a meaningful way, making evidence-based recommendations for change. (d'Haenens and Joris, 2020: 438) The group of actors narrating migration explored in this special issue include diaspora and migrant journalists (Kirk, 2019;Voronova, 2019), government officials and policy makers (Madörin, 2019), migrants and refugees (Dhoest, 2019;Greene, 2019;Løland, 2019), diasporas (Almenara-Niebla and Ascanio-Sánchez, 2019) and social media publics (Bozdağ, 2019). The narration of migration happens through anti-migrant social media memes, visual surveillance, digital fingerprints, asylum interviews, smartphone use, refugee selfies and news accounts.…”

Syrian Refugees between Turkish Nationalism and Citizenship

“…A further significant change in the Syrian refugees' legal status was the amendment to the citizenship law in 2016 (Koser Akcapar & Simsek, 2018). The rationale for this change was to offer citizenship status to skilled refugees with economic and cultural capital (Bozdag, 2020;Icduygu & Nimmer, 2020). As of 2019, more than 117 thousand Syrians obtained Turkish citizenship (Erdogan, 2020).…”

“…Although this is a small number (3.3%), it caused a heated public debate. According to Bozdag's (2020) study, the vast majority of the population opposes granting citizenship to Syrians unequivocally (c.f., Icduygu &Nimmer, 2020 andKoser Akcapar &Simsek, 2018). The measures and attempts to achieve better integration, free access to social rights, the policy implementations with respect to work permits, and the amendment of the Turkish Citizenship law in favor of certain Syrian refugees have improved the status of some significantly.…”

“…However, they have not brought about a noticeable change for the majority, and they still lack a status that would ensure long-term residency and unconditional citizenship regardless of their economic or cultural capital. Accordingly, although the data for this article were collected before the implementation of the changes with respect to work permits and citizenship, the results presented here remain relevant, as the perceptions and attitudes of the majority population in Turkey regarding naturalization of the Syrians have not changed (Baban et al, 2017b;Bozdag, 2020;Icduygu & Nimmer, 2020;Koser Akcapar & Simsek, 2018;Simsek, 2018). Moreover, given the increase in media reports of racism and discrimination against, and physical attacks of Syrians, the situation has even worsened (Bozdag, 2020).…”