Scholarship on the MENA Region (Middle East and North Africa)

During the past 25 years, my research, teaching and publications had a significant impact both in terms of academic reception and in the context of international advocacy for dispossessed populations in the MENA region. I have been actively involved with public and non-governmental organizations, providing them with direction and advice on social science research methodology and organizing roundtables, workshops, lecture series with significant public impact. I developed several graduate-level courses on critical human rights, war crimes, international criminal law, and transitional justice in the MENA/SWANA region.

I am strongly committed to engaging undergraduate and graduate students in several countries, both in the Middle East and among Middle Eastern students in Canada. My graduate supervision record is cross-disciplinary, with 3 completed PhDs as the principal supervisor and 12 more Ph.D. projects progressing to completion in the same capacity, in addition to having served on 15 doctoral thesis committees and numerous MA thesis committees.

My work on forced migration in the MENA region has a longstanding history. The publications converge on key issues, the pivotal one being politics of memory and societal and collective responsibility for mass violence and state-enshrined wrong-doing. In my series of articles on the Cyprus conflict, I contextualize the denial of existence of Greek Cypriot refugees by the dominant Turkish Cypriot nationalist discourse as offering the most significant clues concerning the long-term impasse of negotiations about the future of Cyprus and breeds an environment of a zero-sum game. Within Turkish Cypriot society, post-1974 population movements on the island were largely regarded as ‘war casualties,’ which led to the extended suffering of thousands of Greek Cypriots for multiple generations. I identify the acknowledgement of the history and long-term effects of population displacements that have taken place since 1958 as a crucial step in removing the Cyprus issue from the vicious circle of Greco-Turkish conflict.[1] I am one of the first scholars who published on the Cyprus conflict re. the multiple waves of displacement. This body of work is regularly cited by Greek and Cypriot scholars.

My work on the Syrian exodus started in 2015. In 2016, I presented my first set of findings in various international venues concerning my predictions about what will become of the several million Syrian refugees pouring into Turkey and the region. Subsequently, I published “Management of irregular migration: Syrians in Turkey as paradigm shifters for forced migration studies.”[2] I posited that in the context of the series of civil wars that have struck the Middle East since the 1980s, the politico-economic changes in the post-Soviet geography of Eastern Europe and the Russian states, and the continuous turmoil in those parts of Africa and Asia where access to Turkish soil has been possible, Turkey emerged as a regional hub for receiving continuous flows of forced migration. Many of these “irregular migrants,” “stateless peoples,” or “asylum seekers” eventually become continuously employed under very unstable circumstances, thus fitting into the definition of the “precariat” or precarious proletariat. My work is cited as one of the first scholarly publications that examine the context within which such pervasive precarity takes root, directly affecting vulnerable groups such as the Syrian forced migrants arriving in Turkey in successive waves.

I have also completed a series of research projects and several years of collaborative work with community organizations that led to a distinct series of writings on minorities in the MENA region. The beginning point of this endeavour was an article titled “The legacy of forced migrations in modern Turkish society: remembrance of the things past?”[3] In this piece, I problematized the remembrance of ‘the life and times’ of Orthodox Christian communities that once lived in Asia Minor. In my later work, I observed a very similar pattern whereby the denial or only partial recognition of both the causes and the effects of the large-scale demographic re-shuffling led to successive series of similar measures, each finding wide-spread societal approval. My work is recognized amongst Middle Eastern and South East European studies scholars as a steady voice opposing the nostalgic remembrance of a Golden Age and the politically deceptive longings for harmonious multiculturalism in modern Middle Eastern states.

Regarding my work on several waves of refugee crisis in the MENA region, as my article on ‘Migration as Necessity” posits, concerning the Syrian exodus, what is desperately needed is the development of an ideational platform that underscores the importance of public responsibility concerning immigration issues.[4] All of my work emphasizes that Europe did not become what it is as a desolate island of wealth. This is an angle that repeatedly brings traditions of critiques of capitalism onto the table as part of the larger discussion on global mobilities, as well as violence-related forms of dispossession. Throughout my work on dispossession and displacement in the region, not just in the case of the Syrian exodus, I argue that as long as suffering engulfs the dreamland of opportunity and glitz, there will be continuous flows as a matter of necessity rather than choice. Of the various ethical perspectives available in the context of migration, when migration as a necessity is the entry point, rule of law positivism does not suffice. Similarly, contractarian legal ethics becomes a dead end in and of itself because of its heavy emphasis on state sovereignty and keeping what you take from others all to yourself and defending your choice in the name of borders. I argue that we need an approach that capitalizes on a global methodology of redistributive and restorative justice and an adjuvant legal ethics pertaining to forced migration that could bring these realizations home. This is a counter-position to much of the earlier literature on global mobilities, which is used as a reference point in both policy debates and for establishing curricula. In a world torn apart and ridden with deep inequalities where citizenship in another country becomes an acquired asset for those who are tarnished in their country of origin, this desire to contain human suffering and human need is not attainable.[5]