Civil Society and Refugees in Berlin: Between De-Bordering and Re-Bordering?

Using the Berlin case, I discuss how civil society actors have engaged in bordering processes in the aftermath of the 2015 arrivals. To do so, I combine critical border, migration and urban studies and move beyond state-centric approaches, which conceptualize “borders” as fixed territorial lines. Adopting a Foucauldian lens, I focus on bordering practices, understanding them as a dispositif, which operate and are reproduced at multiscalar levels by various state and non-state actors.  In line with this analytical framework and drawing on the research data collected in Berlin between 2017-2018, I aim to illustrate to what extent civil society actors have challenged and transformed these practices vis-à-vis refugees within and through the urban space. Furthermore, I contextualize the practices of civil society actors by looking at their interaction with a specific urban context, and the existing political and structural dynamics in which they emerge and operate.

Vita: Dr. Burcu Toğral Koca is currently PSI fellow at the IRS. She completed her undergraduate studies in International Relations (major) and Sociology (minor) at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara. She received an MA in European Studies and PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg. During her PhD study, she stayed as a visiting scholar at the University of Kent in Brussels and the Fundación José Ortega y Gasset in Madrid. Before coming to the IRS, she worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Eskişehir Osmangazi University in Turkey between 2014-2017 and taught undergraduate and graduate courses on politics of migration, social movements, history of political thought and political sociology. She has also been teaching at the ISR/TU, where she will be conducting a project on the interplay between migration, civil society and urban transformation as an Einstein Research Fellow starting from the February 2019. Her fields of research interests are securitization of migration, bordering practices, social movements and racism.