Urban poor migrants in Turkey: why are they still committed and loyal to the state and social order?

Abstract

Social movements and their effects on society have been attractive for researcher for over a century. Especially together with the workers’ movements in the 19th century, different approaches and explanations were produced from distinct point of views in order to analyse the reasons, forming process, participants, aims, effects, emergence and decline processes, and results of social movements have been discussed and analysed. In these years, features, aims and participants of social movements have also changed. Especially in the last four decades new explanation were produced in order to explain this change such as resource mobilisation and new social movement approach. Change in people’s experiences, globalisation, and improvement in technologies have increased awareness of people about the problems of their everyday experiences.

In this route, urban poor’s experiences in Turkey changed due to social, political, demographic and economic developments particularly in the last three decades. Urban poor migrants, previously, had different tools such as family/kinship solidarity, continuing tie with their villages and opportunity to have informal urban settlements. These tools eased their integration into the cities they migrated and were used as coping mechanisms in order to reach better living standards and upward mobility. However, these tools lost their effectiveness due to change in the structures, earthquakes and economic crisis during 1990s. Therefore, newly coming migrants could not involve with these
traditional welfare mechanisms.

However, even in the environment where traditional mechanisms have weakened and during economic crisis, some segments of urban poor migrants appeared to be stayed committed to the state and social order. Although it is anticipated that these problems cause frustration and anger for poor migrants against the rest of society and the state, thus these factors increase their demand to form and participate in social movements, these groups prefer to stay away from this kind of movements and do not participate in social movements even if these movements aim to defend their rights and increase their living conditions.

Therefore, the focus of this research is exploring the main factors that affect urban poor migrants’ attitudes and behaviours towards the state and society in Turkey even it is anticipated that urban poor migrants experience relative deprivation and this might cause frustration and grievance towards society and state. The research found a number of factors that affect urban poor migrants’ attitudes and approaches towards the state and the rest of society. It was also found that some factors which are closely related to Turkey’s unique features are more effective amongst all factors.

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