Join the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program for “From Entitlement to Deservingness: Queer Migration through Turkey to the EU and North America" with Mert Koçak, Keyman Posdoctoral Fellow, on Monday, May 4th at 4pm in Harris Hall, Room 108. Reception to follow.
Migration has long exposed the limits of the liberal international order. Refugee protection has sat uneasily within liberalism because universal rights claims have always been constrained by the nation-state’s authority to control borders, regulate entry, and define membership. If entitlement ever appeared to organize the system, it did so partly as a normative performance. With the intensification of displacement in the 2010s and the rise of authoritarian politics, that fragile performance became harder to sustain. As containment, border externalization, and selective admission became more central, migration governance has been increasingly redesigned through a dispersed and multi-actor field composed of states, international organizations, NGOs, and funding regimes.
Turkey offers a particularly important site for understanding these transformations. Positioned as a strategic migration hub between the Middle East, Europe, and North America, Turkey has become a key space through which displaced people move, wait, and are filtered before reaching countries in the Global North. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Turkey between 2017 and 2020, as well as longitudinal engagement from 2022 to June 2025, this talk examines the experiences of queer asylum seekers and refugees from the MENA region and Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that they do not encounter protection as a stable juridical entitlement. Instead, they navigate an uneven matrix of provincial migration offices, UNHCR, NGOs, and third-country actors, while the EU and North America shape this field from a distance through resettlement, sponsorship, funding, and protection frameworks.
To explain this fragmented field, the talk introduces the concept of the transnational matrix of deservingness. Refugee status and rights are fractured across time and space, reworked under different institutional mandates, and accessed through negotiation rather than guaranteed recognition. This matrix is not governed by a single hierarchy of values. It is instead partially stabilized through what I call consistency as everyday negotiation, a process shaped by bureaucratic discretion, NGO mediation, and transnational funding structures. Sexuality and gender are central to this history. They have long served as key terrains through which liberalism constructed its moral self-image, distinguished itself from racialized and illiberal others, and organized the boundaries of legitimate protection. At the same time, queer and trans asylum claims reveal how fragile these promises are, since recognition depends not on the universal application of rights but on judgments about credible identity, proper victimhood, and deserving forms of life.
Elizabeth Howell
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