Emotional Borders: People on the move during Syria’s civil conflict

Guest post by Suzan Ilcan. Suzan is Professor & University Research Chair in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research focuses on critical migration and border studies, asylum policies, and citizenship and social justice. She is principal investigator of a SSHRC-funded project on borders, asylum, and resettlement in Cyprus. 

Since the 2011 Syrian civil conflict, there has been an increase in social conflicts over border and migration issues in Europe and elsewhere. In 2015 and 2016, during the so-called “refugee crisis”, many European governments invoked measures to tighten their border and migration policies and limit border-crossers from Syria. These measures included temporary border cessations, the execution of the EU-Turkey Statement, and other externalization policies. During this “crisis”, more than 6.5 million people were displaced within Syria and more than 4 million people were forced to leave the country for nearby countries, such as Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. In these ‘host’ countries, numerous migrants experienced precarious legal status and limited rights, with some being compelled to stay in their homes intermittently to avoid workplace raids by police to enforce deportation orders. In response to migration precarity and displacement, countless people have developed strategies to negotiate mobility, belonging, rights, and citizenship during their journeys. 

This blog post is informed by qualitative, in-depth interviews and informal conversations with people who escaped the war in Syria. My interlocutors include 55 formerly displaced Syrians who now live in Ontario, Canada and 10 formerly displaced Syrians who now live in Stockholm, Sweden. These individuals fled Syria between 2011 and 2017. Through their regular and irregular border crossings, they confronted various governing authorities, policy regulations, and border processes as emotional, material, and social challenges.  

Understanding the role of emotions in border contexts provides an additional site of knowledge production, enabling insights on how borders can not only promote feelings of fear, anger, or unease for people on the move, but also how emotions lead people to confront, negotiate, and even attempt to bypass borders and military checkpoints during migratory journeys.  

Image Credit: Suzan Ilcan

Mobile Emotions 

Identity card checks, interrogations, arbitrary arrests, protracted waiting, and the horrifying sounds of security guards pulling people from border security line-ups occur at borders. These are some of the ways in which borders create emotional environments. Borders induce fear, anticipation, anxieties, as well as “listening practices” and hope for people on the move. These emotive forces affect people’s encounters with borders, generating what Ben Anderson and Closs Stephens call “affective atmospheres”.   

The apprehension of relocating 

In the face of global inequalities and humanitarian narratives, people who were compelled to leave Syria engaged in negotiating practices to facilitate mobility, elusion, and escape, but also to enable them to stay in a country by exercising their rights as asylum-seekers or refugees. During interviews, my interlocutors emphasized their fragmented journeys from cities in Syria to safer areas in the country, and, later, to nearby countries. Some spoke about their apprehensive encounters with personnel at inter-state military checkpoints and territorial borders. Others emphasized eluding territorial borders by climbing over barbed wire fences and struggling through dense forests, cold nights, and waiting zones under the instruction of intermediaries. For example, Yara, a woman in mid-thirties and originally from Damascus, recollected staying with family members in a waiting zone, near a shoreline in Marmaris, Turkey, for several days. She anxiously listened for sounds of an idling boat that they were to board, as arranged by an intermediary, on route to Rhodes, and later to Athens, and finally to Stockholm to apply for asylum and stay with relatives there. She prioritized audibility over visibility to aid in her escape.  

One of my interlocutors, Jamal, a self-identified Kurdish Syrian man living in Toronto, discussed his journey out of Syria in 2015-2016. While his plan was to travel to southern Turkey, he told a border guard he would travel to a town in Lebanon where his close friend lived. Jamal stated: “I arrived at a Syrian-Lebanese border with my ID in my pocket... The border guard asked for my ID... He asked me questions, like where was I going, why I was going there... why I was leaving. I answered and stayed calm, but I was frightened inside. He looked me in the eyes again. At that moment, I thought he could prevent me from passing, or detain, or shoot me. We heard of such things occurring at border areas.... He let me pass.” Like other border-crossers, Jamal hired an intermediary through his smuggling networks in Beirut to help him circumvent Turkish border authorities. This intermediary provided crucial services to enable his irregular crossings to Kilis, Turkey – a response to the restrictive migration and border controls amplified by the Syrian civil conflict. After arriving in Kilis without legal documents, he worked in a community organization for almost one year until Turkish police crackdowns started targeting “illegal” Syrians. 

Many other people on the move experienced fear, unease, and anxiety while also nurturing feelings of hope during their escape routes out of Syria. Some encountered inter-state military checkpoints, where they heard military personnel interrogate and frighten people wanting to relocate. Other people practiced listening to the sounds of military personnel and their interrogations, and learning from the conversations of people waiting at checkpoints, which helped them negotiate border environments, engendering what LaBelle calls “sonic agency”. Like other military checkpoints, these checkpoints highlight the embodied experiences and emotional attributes of border environments. 

I have posited that borders are more than governing forms or material infrastructures; they are emotional sites of encounter and negotiation. When asking people on the move about encountering and negotiating borders during their migratory journeys, we learn about their sensuous and knowledge practices concerning border crossings, waiting zones, and host states. Such practices are critical for understanding border environments and how they can disrupt normative narratives about refugee movements, and help us rethink borders by focussing on the role of emotions in migratory journeys.  

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