The shaping of the Turkish migration policy: competing influences between the European Union, international organisations and domestic authorities.

This thesis studies Turkish migration policies as an outcome of the interactions between the European Union, international organisations (UNHCR, IOM) and domestic migration governance. Counterbalancing a tendency in the literature to focus on external influences and specifically the EU’s power over candidate countries, Turkish migration policy is seen to result from interrelationships between external and domestic actors that vary according to context of policy type, time and relative balance of power between the actors. Changes in international relations, Turkey’s relationship with the EU, and internal to migration governance, can relativize the power asymmetry between EU and Turkey, leading to opportunities for domestic authorities to exert influence. The study has a comparative design across four cases of migration policy decision-making and by actor-type. This allows investigation of interrelations and an actor’s efforts to exert influence relative to the others. A prominent policy is examined for each of the main four fields of Turkish migration policy: legislative reform (Law on Foreigners and International Protection), irregular migration (EU-Turkey readmission agreement), regular migration (adoption of the EU’s visa lists) and asylum (removal of geographical limitation clause from the 1951 Refugee Convention). Document analysis is supplemented by original data from twenty-one semi-structured interviews, conducted with experts from Turkish Ministries, international organisations and the EU Commission. The main finding is that the degree of external influence over Turkish migration policy is contextually shaped, by time, the substance of a specific policy field, and most notably by the degree to which a policy field is politicised. EU influence is strongest when a policy field is politicised and driven by ‘conditionality’. International organisations are less influential actors but present in shaping more technocratic and less politicised policies through ‘social policy learning’. Turkish authorities exert clear agency and use international negotiations to gain leverage to advance domestic migration interests.