Diaspora Engagement Policies as Transnational Social Engineering: Rise and Failure of Turkey’s Diaspora Policies

Abstract

Abstract: In examining the transformations in statecraft, the existing scholarship on Turkish diaspora policies largely adopts Foucault’s governmentality perspective and suggests that the shifting policies reflect the home states’ attempt to assert control over citizens, not through coercion but rather through consent. While this framing has proved workable, it provides limited room for students of diaspora studies to incorporate the overall conceptualization on the resistance in which the non-resident citizens and countries of residence engage vis-à-vis home country politics and the potential failures of these policies. I propose to follow James Scott’s legibility framework to emphasize that the home states’ evolving policies to engage with non-resident citizens is a social engineering project, aiming to facilitate the state’s ability to monitor and mold the behavior of mobile populations in the context of neoliberal globalization. I argue that the legibility framework allows us to analyze not only the standardization processes, but also the resistance against it both from the migrants and from their countries of residence. To make my argument, I employ the framework to the case of Turkey, which has received considerable attention since the mid-2010s. This article is based on archival research of Turkish state documents on emigration, empirical research conducted between 2013 and 2014 involving nearly 100 interviewees including Turkish state officials in Turkey and with migrant representatives in France and the United States, and further examination of secondary resources, including informal talks with policy makers and diaspora representatives in the post-2016 period.