Lecture | LUCIS What's New?! Series

[Cancelled until further notice] Connected Histories of Migration Control: The Ottoman Empire, Turkey and the ‘West.’

Beste İşleyen

Date: Thursday 10 November 2022
Time: 17:15 - 18:15
Explanation: Please register below
Series: What's New?! Fall Lecture Series 2022
Location: Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden
Room: 1.18

Lajos Kossuth, a Hungarian revolutionary, who fled to the Ottoman Empire and was given protection as a refugee together with his co-revolutionaries

Common narratives on the emergence of logics, techniques, and technologies of migration control are Eurocentric. On the one hand, the foundational role of colonialism, imperialism, and race in the historical development, deployment, and global dissemination of migration control is suppressed; on the other hand, the ‘non-West’ is largely absent in scholarly debates on histories of migration control. This talk aims to contribute to the debate on the Eurocentrism of migration and borders research by bringing in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey. I will first review existing critiques of Eurocentrism in the study of migration and borders. I will then argue that attempts to remedy the Eurocentrism of the field has reproduced some of the fundamental problems of current scholarship regarding the absence of the ‘non-West’. After discussing the repercussions of this absence in conceptual terms, I will advocate integrating ‘non-Western’ histories into our accounts of the emergence and evolution of migration and border control.

About Beste İşleyen

Beste İşleyen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches International Relations, Decolonial/Postcolonial Studies, and European Politics. Her research addresses conceptual and empirical questions of border security, territoriality, technology, and practices. She is presently a governing board member of the European International Studies Association and editor of the journal, International Political Sociology. İşleyen acts as co-leader of the ‘Europe in the World’ theme of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) and co-convener (with Tasniem Anwar) of the ACES Online Series, ‘Decolonising Europe’.