Population Exchange and the Politics of Ethno-Religious Fear: the EU-Turkey Agreement on Syrian Refugees in Historical Perspective

Gregory Goalwin

No mrf2g, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: In March, the EU and Turkey reached an agreement in which all refugees who reach Greece through unauthorized means would be returned to Turkey. The deal is the latest effort to ‘stem the tide’ of refugees who have fled the Middle East. Yet this is not the first time negotiations between Europe and Turkey have resulted in an agreement to exchange problematic populations. As part of the negotiations ending WWI, Turkey and Europe agreed to an exchange of populations in which Christians in Turkey would be sent to Greece in exchange for Greece’s small population of Muslims. This project draws upon historical research and contemporary policy to compare the 2016 EU-Turkey Refugee Agreement and the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange. A comparative approach reveals the European response to this refugee crisis is not merely an echo of past sentiments, but the product of patterns of prejudice that have structured relationships between majority populations and religious minority and refugee populations, in Europe and Turkey alike.

Date: 2017-10-18
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/59e79ffa9ad5a1026457a8b5/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:mrf2g

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/mrf2g

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().