DIASPORALANDS investigates the continuities and changes in Turkey’s diasporic landscapes during the last decade, which coincides with the democratic decline and regime change in Turkey. By using Turkey’s diaspora communities in the United Kingdom and in Germany as case studies, it investigates how the authoritarian drift in the homeland affects diaspora spaces and how host countries respond to authoritarian states’ engagement with their diasporas in their territory. It proposes a novel methodology which combines bottom-up voices with top-down narratives in order to present a comprehensive picture of the triadic relationship between Turkey, its diasporas and the host countries. It not only focuses on elite-level political processes but also investigate the impact of domestic transformations and their transnational impact on everyday lives of diasporans in Europe and therefore reveals visible and invisible impacts on diasporic landscapes will come to the fore. Turkey’s authoritarian turn, which approximately started after the Gezi Protests in 2013 and accelerated after the attempted coup in 2016, created a new-wave of migration from Turkey, mostly towards Europe, as a result of undemocratic practices, economic uncertainties and societal polarization. This new-wave is the most significant one since the 1990s, where Kurdish asylum seekers flooded Europe as a result of the Turkish-PKK conflict. Turkey’s diaspora communities abroad were already heterogeneous along ethnic/religious/ideological lines, consisting of Turks, Kurds, Alevites, Leftists, and Nationalists, among others. This new-wave of migration is changing the current profile of Turkey’s diaspora in European countries and bringing new dynamics to the transnational space. New flows bring new contestations with them, and Turkey’s domestic politics has spilled-over into Europe via multifaceted actions and actors, including the involvement of home and host states. This project aims at filling this research gap by using Turkey’s diasporas in Germany and in the UK as case studies. DIASPORALANDS goes beyond the state of the art and be pioneering in its approach by scrutinizing the impacts of Turkey’s illiberal transformation at elite and societal levels in the host countries via using mixed methods.
DIASPORALANDS aims to understand how diasporas take shape and form in the transnational space that is created between authoritarian home states and liberal host states. The project proposes the following objectives : O1: acquire new knowledge on diaspora-homeland-hostland relations, O2: analyse the impacts of transnational authoritarianism on this triadic relationship, O3: contribute to discussions on transnational repression mechanisms on diasporan’s everyday lives, O4:draw conclusions from the two case studies to help us better understand other cases from MENA, Central Asia and Africa, including cases such as Egypt, Morocco, Azerbaijan, and Rwanda, among others, O5:Disseminate project findings to academic and non-academic audiences, O6: Invest in career development of the researcher to enhance his credentials as a scholar.
