Migration from Turkey to Sweden ─ Integration, Belonging and Transnational Community

The "refugee crisis" and the recent rise of anti-immigration parties across Europe has prompted widespread debates about migration, integration, and security on the continent. But the perspectives and experiences of immigrants in northern and western Europe have equal political significance for contemporary European societies.

While Turkish migration to Europe has been a vital area of research, little scholarly attention has been paid to Turkish migration to specifically Sweden, which has a mix of religious and ethnic groups from Turkey and where now well over 100,000 Swedes have Turkish origins. This book examines immigration from Turkey to Sweden from its beginnings in the mid-1960s, when the recruitment of workers was needed to satisfy the expanding industrial economy. It traces the impact of Sweden's economic downturn, and the effects of the 1971 Turkish military intervention and the 1980 military coup, after which asylum seekers—mostly Assyrian Christians and Kurds—sought refuge in Sweden.

Contributors explore how the patterns of labor migration and interactions with Swedish society impacted the social and political attitudes of these different communities, their sense of belonging, and diasporic activism. The book also investigates issues of integration, return migration, transnational ties, external voting, and citizenship rights.

Through the detailed analysis of migration to Sweden and emigration from Turkey, this book sheds new light on the situation of migrants in Europe.

Paul T. Levin is the founding director of the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS). Previously, he served as program director for governance and management training and taught international relations at the department of economic history, both at Stockholm University. He received his Ph.D. from the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Levin is also the author of Turkey and the European Union: Christian and Secular Images of Islam and is a frequent commentator on Turkish affairs in Swedish and international media.

Bahar Baser is a research fellow at the Centre for Peace, Trust, and Social Relations at Coventry University and a visiting research fellow at the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa (SIGLA) at Stellenbosch University, funded by the National Research Foundation. She completed her Ph.D. in social and political sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. Baser is also the author of Diasporas and Homeland Conflicts (2015) and co-editor of Authoritarian Politics in Turkey (forthcoming 2017). She has various publications in peer-reviewed academic journals, including Terrorism and Political Violence, Ethnopolitics and the International Journal of Kurdish Studies.