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TITLE OF PAPER Gendered Vulnerabilities: Assessing the Deservingness of Refugee Women Under International Protection in Turkey
AUTHORS NAME Meriç Çağlar
AFFILIATION PhD Candidate in Gender Studies
UNIVERSITY / INSTITUTE Central European University
MAIL caglar_meric@phd.ceu.edu
ABSTRACT

This research aims to examine how refugee women under international protection living in satellite cities of Turkey have access to social and financial aid schemes. According to the geographic limitation on the 1951 Geneva Convention, Turkey only accepts refugees from Europe, and asylum seekers from other countries such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and African countries –conditional refugees under temporary protection of UNHCR- are allowed to reside in cities, called satellite cities, until their resettlement to a third country. As these cities are relatively less developed cities of Turkey, they present very limited options in terms of socio-economic integration and refugees’ access to labor market.
As a result, particular groups generally defined as ‘vulnerable groups’ with no sustainable income become dependent on the financial aid and donations that they receive from the State, UNHCR and migrant NGO’s. All these different schemes of financial aid, while an important source of income for refugees, still apply a canonic understanding on refugeeness and categories of vulnerability. I argue that this system of economic dependency and vulnerability assessment put refugees in a situation where they have to present themselves as ‘the ideal deserving subjects’. As Malkkii (1995) suggests, the depiction of ‘refugeeness’ as vulnerable and helpless in humanitarian discourses reinforces the representation of refugees as being in need of rescue and protection. The refugee has been essentialized, if not fetishized, as the ultimate victim whose vulnerability makes him/her deserving of help and protection, and the perfect object of humanitarian politics and discourses. In addition, the concepts of ultimate victim and ideal deserving subject are not only highly subjective or even arbitrary, but also based on gendered and racialized assumptions.
In order to examine how does the relationship of gendered vulnerabilities and deservingness is established and put into practice in the example of social aid schemes in Turkey, I’ve conduced a qualitative research with participant observation and interviews with refugees women themselves, and institutional representatives in Eskişehir, Ankara and Istanbul.

BIOGRAPHY

Meriç Çağlar is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at Central European University. She completed her MAs at Rovira i Virgili (Mediterranean Relations) and Pompeu Fabra (Migration Management) Universities in Spain, and worked as a researcher and a coordinator at Migration Research Centre at Koç University, Istanbul. Currently she is working on her PhD project entitled ‘Assessing the Hierarchy of Deservingness Through Victimhood: Refugee Women Under International Protection in Turkey’. Her research interests lie in the area of; intersectionality in migration studies, critical race theory, post-colonial feminisms, categorization of migrants, refugee integration in Turkey, and migrant deservingness.

CO-AUTHORS

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KEYWORDS gendered vulnerability, migrant deservingness, refugee protection, intersectionality
STREAM 2. Migration: Sexual and Gendered Displacements
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