“Suriyeli kadın”: The image of Syrian refugee woman in strategic plans of the Turkish administration - a text mining analysis

This paper discusses the Design, Implementation, and outcome of data mining in more than one thousand strategic plans and documents produced by municipal administrations in Turkey between 2008 and 2022. Although text mining is used to analyze political manifestos and parliament documents in English and German, this study is the first to apply text mining to documents of local administrations in Turkey. My project analyzes how documents written on the municipal level reflect policy change in reaction to almost four million refugees arriving in Turkey within the past decade. My talk focuses on women refugees and their perceptions, as reflected in this corpus. Turkey itself has turned from a classic country of emigration to one of the essential arrival and waypoint countries for people on the move in contexts of forced migrations. Municipalities are the first administrative bodies to face migration challenges. Their documents provide immediate insights into how institutions react to the impact of forced migration. This paper focuses on how the role of women is constructed in the Turkish migration regime and puts three figures in a dialog: the “woman of the republic” of the Turkish nation-state, the Eastern European care worker as Turkey becomes a destination for labor migrants and the women refugee from Syria in the current debate and policy change. Findings are based on analyzing a corpus of strategic plans and reports of all (81) Turkish municipalities with 50.000 or more inhabitants since 2008. Using R (and primarily the package quanteda), data mining is conducted across 1188 such documents. Methods like “keyword-in-context”-analysis and topic-modeling reveal the framework in which municipal authorities, international organizations, and other actors discuss, create, and develop programs for refugees, and in the process, construct the ‘women refugee’. Results shed light on local reactions to refugee movements. At first, the Syrian people were described as “guests” who had no rights beyond their right to be present within this framework. Today, as persons under “temporary protection,” Syrian refugees’ legal situation has changed but remains precarious. Informal fields of employment in care work are exacerbating the social situation of women refugees. The entangled triad of gender, ethnicity, and class further impacts this group. Even before the Syrian war, domestic violence against women was a significant problem in Turkey. Hence Turkey’s withdrawal from the “Istanbul” convention in 2021 makes it even more challenging to protect women. In negotiating the presence of Syrian refugees, Turkey is also experiencing a déjà-vu moment facing the archaic tradition of polygamy, which women’s movements had hoped to overcome. The “Syrian refugee woman” figure serves as a projection screen for old fears of the Turkish Republic. The nexus between “vulnerability” and “empowerment” of refugee women, who are neither passive victims nor a homogeneous group dominated by men, becomes legible through the analysis of municipal documents. It is an androcentric view of reality that heteronormatively sharpens the view of women.