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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes "staying with politics" to challenge mobility/immobility binaries. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, I examine how authoritarianism reconfigures privileges, generating emotions that attach people to resistance in Turkey across different migratory trajectories.

Paper long abstract

Why do left-wing activists with relative but differentiated privilege—education, cultural capital, ethnic and religious positionality, transnational networks—choose to risk everything for uncertain political gains under authoritarianism? Left-wing progressives in Turkey have been studied through outward migration and diaspora politics under authoritarianism (Bulut 2024; Akyüz et al. 2024). However, this framework often reinforces the staying-versus-leaving binary, producing the implicit assumption that where people reside is the only determinant of political attachment. Drawing on scholarship examining the interconnectedness of mobility and immobility (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Ticktin and Youatt 2022), I propose "staying with politics" as an analytical framework. Throughout my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul, I observed different modalities of staying among activists contributing to Istanbul's resistance infrastructure—organizing festivals, documentaries, protests, political education, publishing. These activists inhabit vastly different migratory trajectories: some live abroad but return seasonally; others chose Turkey for activism; some contemplate departure yet remain actively engaged. What binds them is not whether they stay or leave, but their attachments to producing politics in Turkey, shaped by relative privilege that allows migratory possibilities. To theorize what sustains their commitment to resistance in Turkey, I argue that rather than only asking where people stay, we need to attend to how people "stay" and what staying entails.