Abstract

Due to its geographical location between the continents of Europe and Asia, the Republic of Turkey currently hosts millions of refugees. According to UNHCR figures, nearly 4.5 million people of foreign nationality live in the country. Of these, between 300,000 and 500,000 are Afghans, with the remainder belonging to other nationalities. It is estimated that approximately between 170,000 and 180,000 Afghan nationals have legal status. Changes in the Afghan government, increasing economic and political instability, and the ongoing war in Iran are forcing Afghan youth to seek better lives abroad. Because Iran also has a population of Afghan refugees numbering in the millions. For them, Turkey is a major destination and a key transit country for migration to Europe. A significant number of Afghan refugees have used Turkey not as their final destination but as a stepping stone to European countries and other destinations. However, the presence of Afghan refugees in Turkey dates back to the 1980s. A significant number of Afghans fleeing the Soviet-Afghan War and subsequent civil war sought refuge in Turkey. Although the Turkish state has accelerated so-called voluntary return and deportation policies targeting Afghan citizens in recent years, it continues to grapple with refugee-related challenges for multiple structural reasons. Afghan refugees who have fled Afghanistan and sought refuge in Turkey but are unable to move to a third country face numerous problems. The most prominent of these is the issue of integration. While the older generation struggles with integration into Turkish society, the younger generation remains alienated from their own cultural values. This paper is based on oral interviews addressing the problems faced by Afghan refugee families living in Manisa, Turkey, including access to education and healthcare, language barriers, unemployment, and social exclusion.

Keywords: Turkey, Afghanistan, refugees, migration, Manisa, cultural alienation, integration problems

Abstract

This paper is devoted to exploring problems of access to healthcare for refugees in Finland. Refugees encounter structural, infrastructural, and bureaucratic barriers that are further intensified by welfare nationalism and neoliberal logics framing welfare as a limited resource distributed among locals and the newcomers through zero-sum dynamics. In our research, we consider how morally based solidarities among refugees, healthcare workers and mediators impact access of refugees to healthcare in line with established rules or in contradiction to them.

Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted in Finland (2023–2025) with Ukrainian refugees suffering from chronic illnesses, healthcare professionals, and a wide range of mediators (including volunteers, translators, and local residents), the research explores how access to healthcare is achieved in practice. We argue that refugees' search for access to healthcare occurs with the participation and assistance of other actors. Solidarities arise among the actors through the convergence of their moral positions and prove to be a vital resource for ensuring access to medical care.

Such convergence is grounded in several key moral foundations, including (1) humanitarian values emphasizing the primacy of life and suffering (individual level), (2) critiques of institutional inadequacies framed in terms of justice, deservingness, and inclusion (institutional level), and (3) the moral legitimation of the refugees’ claims to welfare resources (structural level). These interactions generate what we conceptualize as a “moral infrastructure” of healthcare access, which operates through informal practices such as out-of-hours care, financial assistance, translation support, and formal assistance in bureaucratic navigation.

The analysis contributes to subject-centered approaches in migration studies and social policy research by foregrounding refugees as active agents whose moral frameworks shape their interactions with welfare institutions and other actors. It also advances the sociology of morality by demonstrating how moral evaluations function both as a basis for solidarity and as a site of contestation within welfare regimes. We argue that morality does not merely complement legal regulation but actively reconfigures it, enabling access where formal rules are lacking, inactive, or restrict access. In doing so, the research challenges neoliberal assumptions about welfare as “a limited good”, showing instead how morally grounded solidarities expand the practical boundaries of welfare provision.

Abstract

This paper examines the everyday experiences of “digital sojourners” (remote-income foreigners without permanent residency) in Turkey and Georgia, focusing on Istanbul, Tbilisi, and Batumi amid the emergence of digital nomad mobility regimes. I argue that the figure of the sojourner is analytically useful for understanding temporary cross-border mobility that is not well captured by migration frameworks centered on settlement, integration, or long-term incorporation. Grounded in individuals’ mobility plans rather than legal categories alone, the concept of digital sojourn makes it possible to analyze how rights, obligations, and belonging are negotiated under conditions of temporality, relationality, and uncertainty. In doing so, the paper disentangles categories of analysis from bureaucratic and everyday practice and rethinks temporary mobility beyond the migrant-as-settler model.

Empirically, the paper draws on 30 semi-structured interviews combined with interactive mapping, conducted in person in September-October 2025, as well as participant observation in online contexts over the past year. It shows that Turkey and Georgia pursue different legal and regulatory strategies toward foreign mobile populations, yet these differences produce strikingly similar outcomes at the level of lived experience. In both cases, digital nomad regimes and adjacent transformations in mobility governance simultaneously generate privileges for a very specific type of foreigner: an ideal figure imagined mainly as politically and socially disconnected, digitally enabled, and primarily valuable as a consumer. At the same time, these regimes intensify the securitization of other forms of foreign presence and limit mobility and belonging opportunities for those who do not fit this model. Rather than simply facilitating mobility, these arrangements selectively distribute access, recognition and livability through a subscription-like logic.

By focusing on everyday emplacement, conviviality, and relations with local communities, the paper demonstrates how mobile foreigners navigate both inclusion and exclusion alongside, and sometimes against, state-assigned migration labels and classifications. It contributes to scholarship on migration, mobility, and belonging by showing how privileged temporary mobility regimes restructure inclusion through selective desirability rather than settlement, and how digital nomadism is sustained through unequal distinctions among foreigners themselves. More broadly, the paper shows that divergent legal strategies can converge in practice, producing similar hierarchies of mobility, belonging, and emplacement.

Abstract

This paper examines the migration trends, processes, and settlement experiences of Central Asian Muslims in Europe, with a particular focus on the United Kingdom. The diversification of migration patterns in Central Asian countries—shaped in part by bilateral agreements between Central Asian states and several Western countries—has created new opportunities for seasonal employment in Europe, including the UK. Although Russia remains the primary destination for labour migrants from Central Asia, it is no longer the sole attractive option due to evolving socio-economic and political conditions. Migration to Europe offers the prospect of higher earnings for seasonal workers; however, its scale remains limited by increasingly restrictive immigration policies and the rise of anti-immigration sentiments across Europe.

In recent years, the UK has witnessed an unprecedented increase in the arrival of labour migrants from Central Asia. While precise figures remain unavailable, the number of migrants has grown significantly. This paper explores the migration patterns of Tajik migrants in the UK, focusing on their processes of adaptation, key push and pull factors, and the social and institutional mechanisms that enable them to extend their stay and pursue settlement. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper argues that Central Asian migrants actively utilise existing community networks and legal frameworks to regularise their status and adapt to the UK’s multicultural environment.

Keywords: Central Asia, Muslims, Europe, United Kingdom, Tajik migrants, migration, diaspora

Abstract

This paper examines how uncertainty is deployed as a deliberate tactic of governmentality within the emigration regimes of Kazakhstan and Türkiye. While conventional policy analysis often views legal ambiguity and administrative inconsistency as 'failures,' this study argues that both states strategically utilize uncertainty to manage 'desired' versus 'undesirable' overseas citizens. In both countries, emigration governance includes a wide range of policies, from setting conditions for exit to sending students abroad via state-sponsored programs, and from engaging with citizens abroad - for instance, through extraterritorial voting- to the facilitation of return and reintegration. These policies are constructed through domestic priorities, bilateral affairs and agreements, and international legal frameworks, all of which are shaped by geopolitical and security concerns, economic opportunities, and the international political climate.

The theoretical approach and empirical foundation of this research are drawn from the Emigrant Policy Regimes (EMIGPOL) Project. Launched in 2022, the project comprehensively examines the policies of 21 countries - selected from the top 25 globally with the highest number of emigrants according to UN DESA Population Statistics- to analyze how home states manage their citizens abroad, regulate mobility, and promote return. The project embraces a multi-tier approach, establishing a dialogue between national policies, bilateral agreements, and multilateral cooperation frameworks on one hand, and exit, emigrant engagement, and return policies on the other.

This paper demonstrates that both states navigate the tensions between national security and transnational identity politics, suggesting that uncertainty is not a lack of governance but a sophisticated instrument of power. By maintaining a landscape of unpredictable and/ or silent regulations, Kazakhstan and Türkiye exercise 'sovereign caprice' to filter 'desired' emigrants according to shifting political, economic, and demographic needs. Ultimately, this study contributes to Central Eurasian studies by highlighting how emigration governance serves as a site where state power is reasserted through the management of human mobility and the strategic manufacturing of desirability.