Transnational refugee research in crisis

This was not the image I knew of refugees of a civil war. Refugees of a war brutally fought over the last four years living in Turkey should be living in camps, receiving some kind of aid from internationally organized bodies like the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) or the International Red Cross (IRC). This was my naïve thought when I arrived in Reyhanli in 2015.

Unlike the bustling tourist cities and modern metropolises, Reyhanli resembled a dusty backwater, a city expanding for all the wrong reasons. The city had gone from a small town of tens of thousands with a Turkish majority before 2011 to a bustling city with apartments being constructed at an exponential rate and a growing Syrian majority population by the time I arrived there. This was the summer of 2015 and Turkey was hosting over a million Syrian refugees. Like those in Reyhanli, the vast majority lived in urban centres and could only survive in Turkey earning income through backbreaking labour or savings they brought with them from Syria. Meanwhile, on the borders of Europe, a ‘crisis’ was being forged both internally and externally.

I had spent the summer working on a farm in southern Italy while writing my master's thesis and wanted to go over land to Turkey, where I would meet four other student colleagues from the university. There, we conducted a workshop during August to teach refugees of the Syrian conflict photojournalism and documentary filmmaking with an emphasis on peace building. In July, I took the ferry from Bari to Albania and spent a few weeks travelling up the idyllic Adriatic coast. The atmosphere across the Adriatic region was relaxed, with little public acknowledgement or discourse about the rising daily count of refugee deaths in the eastern Mediterranean. The deaths of migrants were nothing new in recent history (UNHCR 2019).

I realized that I would not have the time needed to go by land the rest of the way as planned, so I took a flight from Tirana to Istanbul. At Istanbul Airport I was stopped by the plain-clothes Turkish security forces, who asked where I would be travelling to. In ignorance I replied that I would be travelling to Hatay.