Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey.

• Author: Parla, Ayse

Precarious Hope by Ayse Parla is the outcome of fieldwork that Parla conducted over years with post-1990s Turkish migrants from Bulgaria, who were/are working in Turkey. Those migrants were undocumented, which means they worked illegally in Turkey, and yet, hoped to obtain Turkish citizenship on the grounds of their Turkish ethnicity (or, as Parla states, of their Turkish race). The author examines these Turkish migrants' quest for Turkish citizenship within the theoretical, anthropological framework of emotion, specifically hope. In this context, hope is analyzed as a 'structured expectation,' which means that the author is not interested in hope as a personal experience, but rather as an emotion that pertains to a specific collective, in this case, Turkish migrants coming from Bulgaria. The migrants Parla researched believed they were in a better position than other undocumented migrants in Turkey because of their Turkish ethnicity, even though they were subjected to the same shifting legal procedure as other migrants, as well as an exploitative black market.

Hence, Parla's main research question is, "[W] hat happens when we read hope in relation to structures of privilege, while also exploring how structures of privilege are not immune to states of precariousness?" (p. 6).

Unlike similar studies that mostly focus on deprived and marginalized undocumented migrants and their struggles, Precarious Hope focuses on migrants who perceive themselves as privileged in comparison to other migrants and based on this sense of relative privilege, 'hope' that they will be treated differently by the Turkish state, and obtain citizenship much more quickly than other migrants. Such hope was historically and still being supported, because all the Turkish settlement laws, that form the basis of Turkish migration policies (the most recent one promulgated in 2006), stipulate that immigration and consequently citizenship will be granted primarily to people of Turkish race. However, Parla argues that due to the peculiar immigration policies of the 1990s and the Turkish state's emerging Neo-Ottomanism, that is, the expansion of the Turkish state to the markets of the former Ottoman Empire and the promotion of Turkish interests through Turkish minorities living there, Turkish migrants coming from Bulgaria are finding it harder to obtain Turkish citizenship. Indeed, it was even hard for them to obtain residence permits, because, in order to be granted one...