Northwestern Keyman Modern Turkish Studies podcasts, 2020
In this episode, our guest was Ayşe Parla, and we had a very interesting conversation with her ab... more In this episode, our guest was Ayşe Parla, and we had a very interesting conversation with her about her new book Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey published by Stanford University Press in 2019. We discussed how migrants from Bulgaria inhabit a liminal position between desirable migrants defined as racial kin and economically precarious subjects, whose belonging to the Turkish nation is constantly renegotiated.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research and writing on transnational migration, hope, precarious labor, dispossession and the governance of difference is situated at the intersections of the politico-legal and the affective-moral realms in Turkey, its borderlands and diasporas. Her first book, Precarious Hope, explored the limits of belonging in Turkey from the perspective of Turkish migrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically privileged but economically precarious, and for whom citizenship is promised even if not guaranteed.
Stanford University Press provided a 20% discount for the listeners of the Keyman Podcast if you purchase the book directly form their website. Follow this link and enter the Promo Code PARLA20 at the checkout to purchase the book with a 20% discount.
Ayşe Parla, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (New Texts Out Now), 2020
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Ayşe Parla (AP): I would like to say pure intention... more Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Ayşe Parla (AP): I would like to say pure intentionality and meticulous planning, but, as probably with most anthropological research, that would only be the less substantial and less interesting part of the story. The long trajectory that resulted in the book is one that combines chance, the political conjuncture, and love at first sight. Chance, because my very first encounter with my interlocutors was not at all deliberate.
This essay revisits the trope of honour and takes stock of its critiques by foregrounding the elu... more This essay revisits the trope of honour and takes stock of its critiques by foregrounding the elusive bodies of undocumented migrant women in Turkey. Specifically, I engage with the extent to which the legal normalization of the culture of honour results in routinized sexual violence against undocumented migrant women and in impunity for the perpetrators. On the one hand, I pursue the critique of honour as an essentalized, generalized and timeless notion about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies. On the other hand, I ponder whether our efforts to battle such stereotypical explanations may occasionally result in giving short shrift to the reality of sexual violence as experienced by those who bear the brunt of it. In avoiding culturalizing honour and yet recognizing its continuing cultural power, I take my inspiration from the concept of ethnographic refusal to navigate a potentially lethal terrain in which migrants, activists, and academics enact, with converging and discrepant stakes, deliberate or unwitting engagements with the demands of ‘honor’. I suggest that being cognizant of the kinds of ethnographic refusals we undertake to foreground or avoid the discomfiting aspects of honour as a gendered norm can aid us in our pursuit towards yet thicker ethnographies of exactly where and when honour continues to matter.
his article focuses on the state confiscation of the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery as more than ju... more his article focuses on the state confiscation of the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery as more than just another fact about the famous 2013 protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul. In addition to coming to terms with the limits of the Gezi uprising in relation to its claims of inclusiveness, such a focus unravels the key tension between, on the one hand, progressive and left-wing calls to promote the allegedly equal, universal citizen in Turkey through protest movements and, on the other hand, the differential property regime on which the Turkish nation-state is founded, the denial of which continues to erode the possibility of equal citizenship. The article demonstrates how the systematic confiscation of Armenian property is normalized in everyday discourse and politics in Turkey in the service of the broader legal governance of minority difference.
After the granting of citizenship to 300,000 immigrants from Bulgaria in 1989, Turkey has enacted... more After the granting of citizenship to 300,000 immigrants from Bulgaria in 1989, Turkey has enacted visa regime changes concerning more recent migrants from Bulgaria, who, according to the most recent modification, are only allowed to stay for 90 days within any six-month period. In this article, the authors demonstrate that the broken lines of legality/illegality produced by these changing policies further entrench the sovereignty of the state through the "inclusive exclusion" of immigrants who are subject to the law but not subject in the law. The temporary legalization of Bulgarian immigrants to Turkey in return for voting in the Bulgarian elections reveals that the state extends its transnational political power by drawing and redrawing the broken lines of legality/illegality. We demonstrate not only the ways in which the migrant population from Bulgaria is managed but also the strategies deployed by the migrants themselves in the face of such sovereign acts. KEYWORDS: immigration, Turkey, Bulgaria, visa policy, sovereignty
This paper addresses the invisibility of the post-1990s irregular migration flows from Bulgaria t... more This paper addresses the invisibility of the post-1990s irregular migration flows from Bulgaria to Turkey in the literature despite the increasingly significant number of such migrants. I suggest that this invisibility stems partially from a problem of classification that has to do with implicit suppositions about eth- nicity and migration. The post-1990s Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria are not specified in accounts of irregular migrant flows directed towards Turkey since they are assumed to belong to the category of ethnic “return” migrants: Because of their ethnic identity as Turkish, all Turkish migrants from Bulgaria tend to get considered as part of the intermittent “return” migration waves from Bulgaria, the most notable and well-known of these being the flight of more than 300,000 Turks in 1989. However, while the ethnic affiliation of the post-1990s migrants from Bulgaria renders them invisible as irregular migrants within scholarly migrant typologies, the same ethnic affiliation does not necessarily work to their advantage when it comes to their legal and social reception in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that prioritizes micro-level analysis from below, the paper demonstrates that the self designated ethnic affiliation of these migrants, counterpoised against their social marginalization as “the Bul- garian” domestics, heightens the paradoxes of belonging and affects migration strategies. The paper thus underscores the significance of ethnic affiliation as a factor that needs to be adequately taken into account in describing the present and in assessing the future of this particular migratory pattern.
The controversy in Turkey over state-enforced virginity examinations on women who infringe on "pu... more The controversy in Turkey over state-enforced virginity examinations on women who infringe on "public morality and rules of modesty" was played out and still remains entrenched within the parameters of the traditional/modern dichotomy. The exams are either tolerated, or even championed,for protecting the traditional values of honor, chastity, and virtue; or alternatively, they are condemned as proof of "our" failure in attaining the desirable degree of modernity. Although they reflect deep-seated values and beliefs towards women and sexuality, I argue instead that the exams are neither the embarrassing remnants of tradition nor are they simply reactionary attempts at its preservation. Rather, they are emblematicof the incorporationof the preoccupation with women's modesty, previously enforced primarily through kinship networks, into the mechanisms of surveillance deployed by the modem state. Neither throwbacks to tradition nor protections thereof, virginity examinations must be viewed as a particularly modem form of institutionalized violence used to secure the sign of the modern and/but chaste woman, as fashioned by the modernization project embarked on by the Turkish nationalist elite under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. This article thus seeks to shift the frame of analysis from the traditional/modem dichotomy by situating virginity exams within the historical context of "thewoman question" in Turkey, and by showing the relevance of that history to contemporary assumptions about gender, citizenship, and nationhood.
Asaminoritygroup,theTurksofBulgariafacedacruel paradox: in Bulgaria during 1984–1989, they were p... more Asaminoritygroup,theTurksofBulgariafacedacruel paradox: in Bulgaria during 1984–1989, they were persecuted by the government because they were ‘Turkish’; in Turkey, the symbolic homeland to which they migrated en masse in 1989, they were marginalized by the local population on account of being ‘Bulgarian’. More than 300,000 Turks fled Bulgaria in 1989, and, although more than half of those immigrants have returned back to Bulgaria after the downfall of the Bulgarian communist government, economically induced migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey have continued apace in the 1990s. This article offers an ethnographic account of these transborder movements and their shifting meanings centered around three immigrants whose crossings have followed different paths: a post-1989 migrant looking for temporary work in Turkey who plans to return to Bulgaria in a couple of years; a 1989 immigrant who left Bulgaria because of the assimilation campaign and settled permanently in Turkey; and a migrant who was forced to leave Bulgaria in 1989 and decided to go back after nine monthsin Turkey. These narrativesof arrival and return, timed by a complex configuration of personal desire, political and economic necessity, and national border regulations, tell tales that complement but also complicate standard accounts of migration conveyed by dates and numbers.
This essay explores the rights of undocumented migrants in Turkey to engage the broader question ... more This essay explores the rights of undocumented migrants in Turkey to engage the broader question of whether the language of rights can serve emancipatory ends for subordinated groups.
Northwestern Keyman Modern Turkish Studies podcasts, 2020
In this episode, our guest was Ayşe Parla, and we had a very interesting conversation with her ab... more In this episode, our guest was Ayşe Parla, and we had a very interesting conversation with her about her new book Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey published by Stanford University Press in 2019. We discussed how migrants from Bulgaria inhabit a liminal position between desirable migrants defined as racial kin and economically precarious subjects, whose belonging to the Turkish nation is constantly renegotiated.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research and writing on transnational migration, hope, precarious labor, dispossession and the governance of difference is situated at the intersections of the politico-legal and the affective-moral realms in Turkey, its borderlands and diasporas. Her first book, Precarious Hope, explored the limits of belonging in Turkey from the perspective of Turkish migrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically privileged but economically precarious, and for whom citizenship is promised even if not guaranteed.
Stanford University Press provided a 20% discount for the listeners of the Keyman Podcast if you purchase the book directly form their website. Follow this link and enter the Promo Code PARLA20 at the checkout to purchase the book with a 20% discount.
Ayşe Parla, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (New Texts Out Now), 2020
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Ayşe Parla (AP): I would like to say pure intention... more Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Ayşe Parla (AP): I would like to say pure intentionality and meticulous planning, but, as probably with most anthropological research, that would only be the less substantial and less interesting part of the story. The long trajectory that resulted in the book is one that combines chance, the political conjuncture, and love at first sight. Chance, because my very first encounter with my interlocutors was not at all deliberate.
This essay revisits the trope of honour and takes stock of its critiques by foregrounding the elu... more This essay revisits the trope of honour and takes stock of its critiques by foregrounding the elusive bodies of undocumented migrant women in Turkey. Specifically, I engage with the extent to which the legal normalization of the culture of honour results in routinized sexual violence against undocumented migrant women and in impunity for the perpetrators. On the one hand, I pursue the critique of honour as an essentalized, generalized and timeless notion about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean societies. On the other hand, I ponder whether our efforts to battle such stereotypical explanations may occasionally result in giving short shrift to the reality of sexual violence as experienced by those who bear the brunt of it. In avoiding culturalizing honour and yet recognizing its continuing cultural power, I take my inspiration from the concept of ethnographic refusal to navigate a potentially lethal terrain in which migrants, activists, and academics enact, with converging and discrepant stakes, deliberate or unwitting engagements with the demands of ‘honor’. I suggest that being cognizant of the kinds of ethnographic refusals we undertake to foreground or avoid the discomfiting aspects of honour as a gendered norm can aid us in our pursuit towards yet thicker ethnographies of exactly where and when honour continues to matter.
his article focuses on the state confiscation of the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery as more than ju... more his article focuses on the state confiscation of the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery as more than just another fact about the famous 2013 protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul. In addition to coming to terms with the limits of the Gezi uprising in relation to its claims of inclusiveness, such a focus unravels the key tension between, on the one hand, progressive and left-wing calls to promote the allegedly equal, universal citizen in Turkey through protest movements and, on the other hand, the differential property regime on which the Turkish nation-state is founded, the denial of which continues to erode the possibility of equal citizenship. The article demonstrates how the systematic confiscation of Armenian property is normalized in everyday discourse and politics in Turkey in the service of the broader legal governance of minority difference.
After the granting of citizenship to 300,000 immigrants from Bulgaria in 1989, Turkey has enacted... more After the granting of citizenship to 300,000 immigrants from Bulgaria in 1989, Turkey has enacted visa regime changes concerning more recent migrants from Bulgaria, who, according to the most recent modification, are only allowed to stay for 90 days within any six-month period. In this article, the authors demonstrate that the broken lines of legality/illegality produced by these changing policies further entrench the sovereignty of the state through the "inclusive exclusion" of immigrants who are subject to the law but not subject in the law. The temporary legalization of Bulgarian immigrants to Turkey in return for voting in the Bulgarian elections reveals that the state extends its transnational political power by drawing and redrawing the broken lines of legality/illegality. We demonstrate not only the ways in which the migrant population from Bulgaria is managed but also the strategies deployed by the migrants themselves in the face of such sovereign acts. KEYWORDS: immigration, Turkey, Bulgaria, visa policy, sovereignty
This paper addresses the invisibility of the post-1990s irregular migration flows from Bulgaria t... more This paper addresses the invisibility of the post-1990s irregular migration flows from Bulgaria to Turkey in the literature despite the increasingly significant number of such migrants. I suggest that this invisibility stems partially from a problem of classification that has to do with implicit suppositions about eth- nicity and migration. The post-1990s Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria are not specified in accounts of irregular migrant flows directed towards Turkey since they are assumed to belong to the category of ethnic “return” migrants: Because of their ethnic identity as Turkish, all Turkish migrants from Bulgaria tend to get considered as part of the intermittent “return” migration waves from Bulgaria, the most notable and well-known of these being the flight of more than 300,000 Turks in 1989. However, while the ethnic affiliation of the post-1990s migrants from Bulgaria renders them invisible as irregular migrants within scholarly migrant typologies, the same ethnic affiliation does not necessarily work to their advantage when it comes to their legal and social reception in Turkey. Based on ethnographic fieldwork that prioritizes micro-level analysis from below, the paper demonstrates that the self designated ethnic affiliation of these migrants, counterpoised against their social marginalization as “the Bul- garian” domestics, heightens the paradoxes of belonging and affects migration strategies. The paper thus underscores the significance of ethnic affiliation as a factor that needs to be adequately taken into account in describing the present and in assessing the future of this particular migratory pattern.
The controversy in Turkey over state-enforced virginity examinations on women who infringe on "pu... more The controversy in Turkey over state-enforced virginity examinations on women who infringe on "public morality and rules of modesty" was played out and still remains entrenched within the parameters of the traditional/modern dichotomy. The exams are either tolerated, or even championed,for protecting the traditional values of honor, chastity, and virtue; or alternatively, they are condemned as proof of "our" failure in attaining the desirable degree of modernity. Although they reflect deep-seated values and beliefs towards women and sexuality, I argue instead that the exams are neither the embarrassing remnants of tradition nor are they simply reactionary attempts at its preservation. Rather, they are emblematicof the incorporationof the preoccupation with women's modesty, previously enforced primarily through kinship networks, into the mechanisms of surveillance deployed by the modem state. Neither throwbacks to tradition nor protections thereof, virginity examinations must be viewed as a particularly modem form of institutionalized violence used to secure the sign of the modern and/but chaste woman, as fashioned by the modernization project embarked on by the Turkish nationalist elite under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. This article thus seeks to shift the frame of analysis from the traditional/modem dichotomy by situating virginity exams within the historical context of "thewoman question" in Turkey, and by showing the relevance of that history to contemporary assumptions about gender, citizenship, and nationhood.
Asaminoritygroup,theTurksofBulgariafacedacruel paradox: in Bulgaria during 1984–1989, they were p... more Asaminoritygroup,theTurksofBulgariafacedacruel paradox: in Bulgaria during 1984–1989, they were persecuted by the government because they were ‘Turkish’; in Turkey, the symbolic homeland to which they migrated en masse in 1989, they were marginalized by the local population on account of being ‘Bulgarian’. More than 300,000 Turks fled Bulgaria in 1989, and, although more than half of those immigrants have returned back to Bulgaria after the downfall of the Bulgarian communist government, economically induced migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey have continued apace in the 1990s. This article offers an ethnographic account of these transborder movements and their shifting meanings centered around three immigrants whose crossings have followed different paths: a post-1989 migrant looking for temporary work in Turkey who plans to return to Bulgaria in a couple of years; a 1989 immigrant who left Bulgaria because of the assimilation campaign and settled permanently in Turkey; and a migrant who was forced to leave Bulgaria in 1989 and decided to go back after nine monthsin Turkey. These narrativesof arrival and return, timed by a complex configuration of personal desire, political and economic necessity, and national border regulations, tell tales that complement but also complicate standard accounts of migration conveyed by dates and numbers.
This essay explores the rights of undocumented migrants in Turkey to engage the broader question ... more This essay explores the rights of undocumented migrants in Turkey to engage the broader question of whether the language of rights can serve emancipatory ends for subordinated groups.
This paper explores the ambiguous purchase that claiming Turkish ethnicity has in Bulgarian Turki... more This paper explores the ambiguous purchase that claiming Turkish ethnicity has in Bulgarian Turkish migrants’ attempts to access formal and social citizenship. I suggest that despite the new Citizenship Law, which appears to eliminate ethnic privilege, the emphasis on Turkish ethnicity continues to play a significant role in the migrants’ attempts at inclusion. I seek to resolve this seeming tension between, on the one hand, the continuing significance of ‘Turkishness’ in migrants’ discursive claims, and, on the other hand, the failure of most of these claims to materialize in practice by addressing the question of social and economic capital. Although ethnic belonging continues to be an important facet of citizenship, social class makes a significant difference in determining who qualifies as a citizen and has access to social citizenship. I thus argue that we need to expand the current terms of the debate on the inclusiveness of citizenship in Turkey, which revolve around ‘denationalization’ and ‘postnationalism,’ to include questions of class-based exclusion.
“Postsocialist nostalgia” among Turkish immigrant women from Bulgaria is not just strategic perfo... more “Postsocialist nostalgia” among Turkish immigrant women from Bulgaria is not just strategic performance to negotiate the challenges that face working women in Turkey but is also cross-cultural analysis based on the migrants’ experiences of distinct gender regimes on the two sides of the border. I explore why the competition between established residents and newcomers over scarce resources becomes, in this instance, the ground for negotiation over proper gender roles. I also suggest that the migrants’ appeal to the communist legacy posits an alternative to either “normalizing” or “Orwellizing” communism and that it offers a more nuanced understanding of the norms and practices of gender and labor under communism, as experienced by this particular group of minority women. [Turkish migrants from Bulgaria, postsocialist nostalgia, gender, honor, Turkey]
This volume collects ten essays that look at intra-regional migration in the Southern Balkans fro... more This volume collects ten essays that look at intra-regional migration in the Southern Balkans from the late Ottoman period to the present. It examines forced as well as voluntary migrations and places these movements within their historical context, including ethnic cleansing, population exchanges, and demographic engineering in the service of nation-building as well as more recent labor migration due to globalization. Inside, readers will find the work of international experts that cuts across national and disciplinary lines. This cross-cultural, comparative approach fully captures the complexity of this highly fractured, yet interconnected, region. Coverage explores the role of population exchanges in the process of nation-building and irredentist policies in interwar Bulgaria, the story of Thracian refugees and their organizations in Bulgaria, the changing waves of migration from the Balkans to Turkey, Albanian immigrants in Greece, and the diminished importance of ethnic migration after the 1990s. In addition, the collection looks at such under-researched aspects of migration as memory, gender, and religion. The field of migration studies in the Southern Balkans is still fragmented along national and disciplinary lines. Moreover, the study of forced and voluntary migrations is often separate with few interconnections. The essays collected in this book bring these different traditions together. This complete portrait will help readers gain deep insight and better understanding into the diverse migration flows and intercultural exchanges that have occurred in the Southern Balkans in the last two centuries.
Uploads
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research and writing on transnational migration, hope, precarious labor, dispossession and the governance of difference is situated at the intersections of the politico-legal and the affective-moral realms in Turkey, its borderlands and diasporas. Her first book, Precarious Hope, explored the limits of belonging in Turkey from the perspective of Turkish migrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically privileged but economically precarious, and for whom citizenship is promised even if not guaranteed.
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-694413625-150839379/ayse-parla
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ay%C5%9Fe-parla/id1457138886?i=1000463211624
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Qqazsb9MbjeqS6GnR7MHx
Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/keyman-modern-turkish-studies-program-podcast?refid=stpr#/login-register
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buffettinstitute/posts/10157517301620412
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BuffettInst/status/1219714298974548190?s=20
Stanford University Press provided a 20% discount for the listeners of the Keyman Podcast if you purchase the book directly form their website. Follow this link and enter the Promo Code PARLA20 at the checkout to purchase the book with a 20% discount.
KEYWORDS: immigration, Turkey, Bulgaria, visa policy, sovereignty
The exams are either tolerated, or even championed,for protecting the traditional values of honor, chastity, and virtue; or alternatively, they are condemned as proof of "our" failure in attaining the desirable degree of modernity. Although they reflect deep-seated values and beliefs towards women and sexuality, I argue instead
that the exams are neither the embarrassing remnants of tradition
nor are they simply reactionary attempts at its preservation. Rather, they are emblematicof the incorporationof the preoccupation with women's modesty, previously enforced primarily through kinship networks, into the mechanisms of surveillance
deployed by the modem state. Neither throwbacks to tradition nor protections thereof, virginity examinations must be viewed as a particularly modem form of institutionalized violence used to secure the sign of the modern and/but chaste woman, as fashioned by the modernization project embarked on by the Turkish nationalist elite under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. This article thus seeks to shift the frame of analysis from the traditional/modem dichotomy by situating virginity exams within the historical context of "thewoman question" in Turkey, and by showing the relevance of that history to contemporary assumptions about gender, citizenship, and nationhood.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research and writing on transnational migration, hope, precarious labor, dispossession and the governance of difference is situated at the intersections of the politico-legal and the affective-moral realms in Turkey, its borderlands and diasporas. Her first book, Precarious Hope, explored the limits of belonging in Turkey from the perspective of Turkish migrants from Bulgaria who are ethnically privileged but economically precarious, and for whom citizenship is promised even if not guaranteed.
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-694413625-150839379/ayse-parla
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ay%C5%9Fe-parla/id1457138886?i=1000463211624
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Qqazsb9MbjeqS6GnR7MHx
Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/keyman-modern-turkish-studies-program-podcast?refid=stpr#/login-register
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buffettinstitute/posts/10157517301620412
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BuffettInst/status/1219714298974548190?s=20
Stanford University Press provided a 20% discount for the listeners of the Keyman Podcast if you purchase the book directly form their website. Follow this link and enter the Promo Code PARLA20 at the checkout to purchase the book with a 20% discount.
KEYWORDS: immigration, Turkey, Bulgaria, visa policy, sovereignty
The exams are either tolerated, or even championed,for protecting the traditional values of honor, chastity, and virtue; or alternatively, they are condemned as proof of "our" failure in attaining the desirable degree of modernity. Although they reflect deep-seated values and beliefs towards women and sexuality, I argue instead
that the exams are neither the embarrassing remnants of tradition
nor are they simply reactionary attempts at its preservation. Rather, they are emblematicof the incorporationof the preoccupation with women's modesty, previously enforced primarily through kinship networks, into the mechanisms of surveillance
deployed by the modem state. Neither throwbacks to tradition nor protections thereof, virginity examinations must be viewed as a particularly modem form of institutionalized violence used to secure the sign of the modern and/but chaste woman, as fashioned by the modernization project embarked on by the Turkish nationalist elite under the leadership of Kemal Atatürk. This article thus seeks to shift the frame of analysis from the traditional/modem dichotomy by situating virginity exams within the historical context of "thewoman question" in Turkey, and by showing the relevance of that history to contemporary assumptions about gender, citizenship, and nationhood.
voluntary migrations and places these movements within their historical context, including ethnic cleansing, population exchanges, and demographic engineering in
the service of nation-building as well as more recent labor migration due to globalization. Inside, readers will find the work of international experts that cuts across national
and disciplinary lines. This cross-cultural, comparative approach fully captures the complexity of this highly fractured, yet interconnected, region. Coverage explores
the role of population exchanges in the process of nation-building and irredentist policies in interwar Bulgaria, the story of Thracian refugees and their organizations
in Bulgaria, the changing waves of migration from the Balkans to Turkey, Albanian immigrants in Greece, and the diminished importance of ethnic migration after the 1990s. In addition, the collection looks at such under-researched aspects of migration as memory, gender, and religion.
The field of migration studies in the Southern Balkans is still fragmented along national and disciplinary lines. Moreover, the study of forced and voluntary migrations is often separate with few interconnections. The essays collected in this book bring these different traditions together. This complete portrait will help readers gain deep insight and better understanding into the diverse migration flows and
intercultural exchanges that have occurred in the Southern Balkans in the last two centuries.