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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how collective tragedy shapes migrant belonging beyond private emotion. Based on interviews with highly skilled Turkish migrants in the Netherlands and Germany after the 2023 earthquakes, it shows how transnational grief and host-country responses reconfigure belonging.

Paper long abstract

Scholarship on migrant belonging has long been informed by transnational perspectives, with recent work increasingly emphasizing the role of emotions in shaping migratory experiences. However, research on emotional transnationalism has largely focused on private, individualized feelings, overlooking emotions generated through collective events in migrants’ countries of origin. This paper addresses this gap by examining how collective emotional experiences shape skilled migrants’ sense of belonging in the transnational space.

Empirically, the study draws on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 11 highly skilled Turkish migrants living in the Netherlands and Germany in the aftermath of the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquakes. The analysis shows that collective tragedy activates complex emotional processes that extend beyond personal grief, producing intensified emotional proximity to the country of origin while simultaneously reconfiguring relationships to the host country. Migrants’ sense of belonging is shaped through transnational affective ties such as grief, guilt, and moral responsibility as well as through their perceptions of institutional and societal responses in the host context, including recognition, solidarity, and silence.

The findings demonstrate that belonging emerges as a dynamic and relational process that is negotiated across borders and mediated by both emotional transnationalism and host-country structures. By foregrounding collective emotions and institutional responses, this paper contributes to debates on migrant belonging, emotional transnationalism, and skilled migration. It argues that collective tragedies constitute critical moments that reveal the emotional and political conditions under which belonging is affirmed, contested, or destabilized in the migratory experience.