Syrian Refugees and Agriculture in Turkey: Work, Precarity, Survival

Turkey is home to the largest Syrian refugee community in the world and the agricultural industry offers work opportunities for vulnerable Syrian refugee families. This book exposes the fast-changing relationship between seasonal agricultural production and the work practices of Syrian refugees in Turkey. Through close ethnographic study carried out over three years with nearly 1000 people, the book illuminates how the increasing number of incoming Syrians results in the ’precarization’ of the workers - particularly women and children. The author examines Syrian families’ working and living conditions with a special interest in the dynamics of how they utilise the labour of women and children to survive and have access to work.

An in-depth study of the Syrian community - at a time when the state apparatus is hostile to research on the subject - the material in this book is unique and offers an insight into remote agricultural sites that are invisible to many. It is an analysis of the precarization process of Syrian labour in an industry that wants to attract the most vulnerable people into the workforce. By focusing on the intersectional vulnerabilities and the context-dependent precarization, the book argues that the commercialization of agricultural production and the increasing use of waged labour blooms antagonistic encounters of different ethnic, cultural and religious groups in rural Turkey.

Saniye Dedeoglu is Associate Professor at Mugla University, Turkey. She is the author of Migrants, Work and Social Integration: Women’s Labour in the Turkish Ethnic Economy (2014) and Women Workers in Turkey: Global Industrial Production in Istanbul (I.B.Tauris, 2012) as well as numerous book chapters and articles.