Affective geopolitics: Anxiety,pain,and ethics in the encounter with Syrian refugees in Turkey

Prologue

Emotions were running high in this focus group of eight lower-class Sunni Muslim women in Konya, Turkey, in December 2014 — so high that one woman walked out in the middle of the conversation. The topic was the policies of Turkey’s ruling party, the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party), or AKP, led by then Prime Minister (now President) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, that allowed the influx of Syrian refugees, ¹ most of whom are reportedly Sunni Arab and Turkmen, across Turkey’s southern border. At the time, there were fewer than two million Syrians registered in Turkey, while now that number is over three million. Yet already the initially more welcoming attitude towards Syrians had started to shift as the conflict became protracted (Erdoğan, 2014: 71). By 2014 it had become clear that the refugees would not be confined to camps and that their presence would not be limited to the border area. Syrians had become an embodied presence in the everyday lives of citizens across Turkey. Reports dating back to 2014 noted concerns about growing tensions between Turkish nationals and Syrian refugees and started calling for long-term integration policies (Erdoğan, 2014; İçduygu, 2015; Kanat and Üstün, 2015). At the time of this focus group, the presence of refugees was felt in Konya, the central Anatolian city known for religious conservatism, entrepreneurship, and universities, where this conversation took place around a hotel conference table. This focus group was one of 32 ² that we conducted with men and women, Alevis and Sunnis, between 2014 and 2016 in three different Turkish cities (Istanbul in the west, Konya in central Anatolia, and Malatya in the east). ³ The snippet of conversation that we quote above flows down the same tributaries that many other focus group discussions across the three cities did: from the assertion that Syrians should have been confined to camps or a distinct geographical area, to concern about the economic and societal burden of the refugees, to racist language that casts the newcomers as vermin. As always in focus groups, a lot of what is happening in the dialogue is emerging from a group dynamic that shapes what is sayable and unsayable (Secor, 2010). In many of our groups, this meant that participants entered a spiral of expressed anxiety, taking the form of resentment, xenophobia, and racism towards the Syrians — usually over the objections of at least one participant who would appeal to Islam, humanitarianism, and/or compassion to call forth a sense of Turkish responsibility towards the refugees. But very rarely did the moral and charitable discourse become the one that sutured the field.

Something unique arose in this particular group: a woman stood up and left, without engaging in argument, in the middle of the discussion. In all the 20 years that the authors have been conducting research (together and apart) on highly politicized topics in Turkey, this was the first time a participant walked out. Why did she do this? Why did she choose to leave rather than express her point of view? What was it in the preceding conversation that became unbearable? Azra was 31 years old, held a middle school degree, was not in paid employment and lived with her husband, mother, and three kids; she expressed her discomfort with the mention of non-Muslim populations and their spaces such as churches in Konya with repeated “tövbe”s (repentance). Directly before she left, women had deepened the critique of the AKP with a turnabout that took the Syrian refugee issue and made it only the latest and most blatant wound to an already dysfunctional society. When Azra says, “I’m glad he [Erdoğan] brought them in,” her tongue is sharp. When she walks out, the proximate cause seems to be hearing women critiquing the AKP and the Prime Minister. A spiraling conversation that seems to be deepening into a critique of AKP rule, a surge of anger perhaps, the awakening of a fight or flight impulse, and she chooses to make a dramatic exit.

Introduction

In this paper, we explore how Turkey’s geopolitical orientations with regard to the Syrian refugee crisis unfold as embodied and affective entanglements. As exemplified in the focus group discussion above, we approach the question of affective and embodied geopolitics from the perspective of long-term residents of Turkey ⁴ in relation to their encounters with both the embodied presence of displaced Syrians and the discourses that frame or contest Turkey’s official “open door” policy. Our project asks how do people variously identifying as men and women, Sunnis and Alevis, Turks and Kurds, in three different Turkish cities (Istanbul in the west, Konya in central Anatolia, and Malatya in the east) affectively encounter what has amounted to the influx of more than three million Syrian refugees over the course of five years from 2011 to 2016? How do people navigate everyday encounters with Syrians in neighborhoods, shared urban spaces, public transportation, hospitals, and schools, and how are regional geopolitical relations — and the policies and stances of the ruling AKP party — filtered through or challenged by embodied and affective encounters with refugees?

Our work follows scholarship in feminist political geography that has called into question presumptive spatial and scalar relations of power by centering bodies, difference, and encounter within the political field (Cockayne et al., 2017; Dowler and Sharp, 2001; Fluri, 2011; Hyndman, 2004; Sharp, 1996; Staeheli et al., 2004; Smith, 2012). Rather than an exclusive focus on states and political leaders as the main geopolitical actors, feminist geopolitics has turned to ordinary people and everyday life to understand how a multiplicity of actors and practices produce and materialize geopolitical strategy. As Deborah Dixon (2014: 139) writes, in the wake of feminist and other critical interventions,

geopolitics has arguably become a matter of inquiring into socio-spatial relations between corporeal bodies and other complex objects in the form of encounters, conjunctions, engagements, negotiations, resonances and congruencies, as they help not only to produce, but also to problematise borders, boundaries, territories, terrains and volumes.

While cities have often been cast as the product of a multiplicity of encounters (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Darling and Wilson, 2016; Massey, 2005), our work carries this idea further to show how geopolitics too is constructed, at least in part, through ordinary encounters. Geopolitics, we argue, emerges within and through the embodied, affective encounter. Indeed, the concept of encounter is inherently bound up with ideas of confrontation and conflict (Ahmed, 2000; Rovisco, 2010; Wilson, 2017). For our purposes, we define encounter as a momentary meeting in which embodied individuals maintain, produce, and negotiate difference (see Wilson and Darling, 2016). Insofar as this process involves the coming into relation of bodies, encounters are unavoidably affective, but that certainly does not imply that they emerge from a social–historical vacuum (Anderson, 2014). An encounter is never simply “face-to-face” but always presupposes “other faces, other encounters of facing, other bodies, other spaces, and other times” (Ahmed, 2000: 7). Subjects, bodies, and spaces — including geopolitical imaginations — are perpetually (re)constituted in these situated, embodied, affective encounters.

By conceptualizing geopolitics through bodies and ordinary encounters, feminist geopolitics orients us towards the affective elements that contribute to the construction of political spatializations. To provide just a few examples, Jennifer Hyndman’s (2007) work has shown how “fatality metrics” represent and shape responses to loss, pain, and destruction of war; Alison Mountz (2004) has demonstrated how an international border is constituted in part at the point of encounter between Canadian civil-servants and potential refugee claimants; and Suncana Laketa’s (2016: 3) work provides an analysis of how divisions between Croats/Catholics and Bosniaks/Muslims in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina “are materialised through different affective intensities.” Scholars of feminist geopolitics encounter affect as part of the practice of what Deborah Dixon (2015) highlights as “feminist materialism” (Braidotti, 2008) in which the lived, sexually situated body composes politics and the social at the same time as it is constituted through these fields. Indeed, understood as bodily capacity, affect is a distinctly material and corporeal concept (see also Protevi, 2009). To risk over-simplifying in the name of clarity, saying that affect materially emerges from and constitutes the geopolitical is to say that the space of politics has affect (or emotion) ⁵ as one of its components, and that these emotions cannot be abstracted from the real, lived encounters that occur between bodies, places, and things. Further, these bodies, places, things, and affects are themselves emerging and differentiating through these encounters. In our discussion of affect as constitutive of the geopolitics of Syrian refugees in Turkey, we therefore do not “bring affect into feminist geopolitics”; instead, we argue that it has been there from the first conceptualizations.

Affective geopolitics, as a feminist approach, does not withdraw politics into the chambers of individual or phenomenological reactivity. Instead, affect is an interplay between the world and the body: it is the body’s capacity to affect and be affected (Deleuze, 1988). In this sense, affect traverses and undermines the notion of a Cartesian, autonomous subject whose body (like other objects) is matter to be controlled by a sovereign mind. An idea of affect as the body’s (virtual) capacity requires an understanding of the body as constituted relationally, collectively, and materially. So, rather than talk about emotions as things that people “have,” an affective geopolitics approach elaborates on structures of political feeling (Anderson, 2014; Protevi, 2009), affective atmospheres (Berlant, 2011), and the sociality of emotion (Ahmed, 2004). These collective, depersonalized, affective structures, atmospheres, and socialities are constituted through the circulation of “objects of feeling” and the concrete encounters that occur in and through this circulation (Ahmed, 2004: 8). This approach to affect is thus at once, to borrow Protevi’s (2009) terms, embodied and embedded, somatic and social.

In this paper, we augment prevalent understandings of affect as collective and social with a psychoanalytic understanding of affect. While this may appear to traverse a disjuncture (see Pile, 2010 and responses in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers), we find this a productive turn. In particular, psychoanalysis, with its attention to how the subject emerges through a relation to alterity, brings to the fore the spatiality of the affective encounter. This is because for Lacan (2014), affect (or more precisely, anxiety) signals the presence of the other within, of the exteriority folded within the subject. This idea brings us closer to understanding how, rather than arising from a pre-established interior/exterior dichotomy, affect actively produces the effect of such divisions, lending a sense of reality to the dualism of inside and outside. Thus, if “geopolitics” creates global maps of friends and enemies, spatially arraying enclosures of “us” and “them,” a critical psychoanalytical attention to the workings of affect opens these cartographies to a topological dynamism, to the entanglement of here and there, of ourselves and others (Carter and McCormack, 2006; Dixon, 2014; Hubbard, 2002; Müller, 2013; Pain, 2009; Puar, 2009). In Ahmed’s (2004: 10) words, emotions “create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that enable us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place.”

Our analysis explores the affect and ethics of encounter as they contribute to producing the lived geopolitics of Turkey’s policies and practices with regard to the Syrian war and refugees. We begin by breaking down the AKP’s geopolitical orientation towards leadership in the Muslim Middle East and Erdoğan’s rhetoric regarding Turkey’s obligation to the Syrians as part of Muslim unity. We then turn to a geographical problem — proximity — by showing how the denigration of Syrian bodies and lives converges with the desire for a spatial organization that would put literal boundaries between “us” and “them.” In line with other recent research that calls into question the myth that urban encounters necessarily foster respect or tolerance (Leitner, 2012; Valentine, 2008), our research highlights the anxiety of these encounters. Yet mired in these “bad encounters” (Ahmed, 2010; Ruez, 2017), we cannot but find ourselves wondering how things might be different. What are the conditions for an ethical encounter, one that might call forth a relationship of responsibility or care? In the final section of this paper, we weave together affect and ethics to focus on pain and the problem of intelligibility in order to understand how we might encounter otherwise.

“The most generous country in the world: Turkey”: The spatial (dis)organization of bodies

In 2015, as a result of the five-year long war in Syria and ongoing violence in Iraq, Turkey overtook Pakistan as the country hosting the world’s largest number of refugees. The pressure produced by the displacement of millions of people in neighboring states, along with the AKP government’s geopolitical ambitions in the region, has spurred changes to immigration policy in Turkey. Turkey maintains a geographic limitation of non-Europeans under the 1951 Convention, which means that there is no path to long-term legal integration for displaced Middle Easterners who are seeking refuge in Turkey. However, since 2011 Turkey has enacted an “open door” policy of non-refoulement and humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees (though according to a recent report, Turkey has sent refugees back to Syria in violation of this policy (Amnesty International, 2016)). Beginning in 2013, Turkey has also offered Syrians and stateless Palestinians displaced from Syria a group-based “temporary protection” status. This status does not lead to permanent residence permits in Turkey, but it does provide access to healthcare, social services, and medical treatment. The status does not grant the Syrian refugees the right to work, though since 2015 a new regulation enables some to apply for work permits (Yıldız and Uzgören, 2016: 5).

Beyond challenging Turkey’s resources and administrative structures, Syrian refugees are the flashpoint for geopolitical maneuvers of war, imperialism, and diplomacy (Espiritu, 2014; Hyndman and Giles, 2016). Claiming that Turkey is bearing the brunt of the economic and societal burden of hosting Syrians with very little aid, Erdoğan has staked out the moral high ground on this issue globally and vis-a-vis Western developed nations (Figure 1). Yet, critics note that Syrian refugees provide an effective “bargaining chip” for the AKP against the EU (Tuğal 2016) — and indeed by taking on the role of EU’s border security agency, Turkey has been empowered to further militarize its southern border and to engage in frequent military operations and humanitarian activities (such as opening schools and running refugee camps) across the border (Amnesty International, 2014: 9; Dinçer et al., 2013; Human Rights Watch, 2012; Koca, 2015). This enables the Turkish state to monitor the situation on the ground and protect its own interests, and especially to undermine the establishment of a Kurdish state in Syria and Iraq.

Critics also note that the AKP regime is using the influx of Sunni Syrian refugees to further solidify its power in Turkey, to secure votes for another generation to come and to reengineer the population of areas where the Alevi minorities lived in relative comfort as majorities (Erdoğan, 2014: 71). In order to recognize the implications of the “Sunnification” of parts of Turkey’s eastern region, it is important to note that 99% of Turkey’s population is officially Muslim and the majority of this population is Sunni Muslim. Alevis, whose practice incorporates elements of Shia Islam and local belief systems and rituals, constitute the largest Muslim minority group with an estimated 8–18% of the population. Since 2002, the rise of the AKP, Erdogan’s Sunni-oriented political party, has put the Alevi minority ever more on edge, though violence and discrimination against Alevis well predate the AKP. The Alevis of Turkey are not identical in their beliefs and practices as the Alawites in Syria, but also not unrelated. The Syrian refugees in Turkey are overwhelmingly Sunni, changing the sectarian demographics of southeastern Turkish provinces such as Hatay. Geopolitical logics have thus come to the fore in the management of refugees in Turkey as they have globally (Hyndman, 2012).

Procedures for refugee management in Turkey involve a significant geographical dimension. The majority of Turkey’s refugee population does not live in camps; according to the UNHCR’s 2016 report, Turkey housed only about 300,000 Syrians in 26 refugee camps (run by the Turkish Disaster Response Agency, Afet ve Acil Durum Yönetimi (AFAD)), while about 2.50 million Syrians are living in cities throughout Turkey. In Turkey, once a refugee has registered with both the state and the UN, the UNHCR sends her/him to one of 62 designated satellite cities located throughout the country. While this practice eases pressures on Istanbul and Ankara, it introduces other problems for refugees because of the dispersal of networks and the lack of translators and other services in the satellite cities. Many refugees nonetheless remain in the bigger cities, some forgoing registration altogether or returning unauthorized from their assigned locations.

In the three cities where we conducted our focus group research (Istanbul, Konya, and Malatya), Syrian refugees were portrayed as threatening order, producing scarcity, undermining the (mythical) homogeneity of society, and disrupting (native) family structures. Frequently, we heard about rising rents, overcrowded hospitals, and unemployment in all three cities because of the Syrian influx. Many were resentful of Syrian youth’s access to Turkish universities without the normally required exams, the assistance that Syrians receive from the Turkish government that is not available to struggling Turks, and even the translation services that Syrians but not Kurds receive at hospitals. Syrians were often referred to in animalistic terms, as swarming and getting underfoot; they were portrayed as smelling different (see also Laketa, 2016: 12), as being lower civilizationally, and as inherently, rather than circumstantially, poor and wretched.

Sara Ahmed (2004: 43) calls this kind of discourse the “organization of hate”: narratives that generate “a subject that is endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs, security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject”. Indeed, the problem was often couched in terms of proximity: Turkey’s involvement in the Syrian war and its open door policy appears as a problem when refugees spread across the country and start living in close proximity to citizens of Turkey — living in the same city, on the same street, in the same apartment building, working in the same factory — thus making encounters more likely and fueling the circulation of resentment and fear.

The threat posed by the proximity of these unasked for neighbors was often expressed in gendered and sexualized terms: Syrian women and girls were cast as a threat to Turkish families and moral order — with endlessly circulating stories of prostitution, willing polygamy, and underage marriage. Syrian men, on the other hand, were depicted as violent and aggressive, causing fights on the street and disturbing public order, involved in theft, and most ominously, as posing a sexual threat to Turkish women and girls. Syrian refugees thus stood in for the neighbor in threatening proximity, inhabited by an uncanny jouissance (Lacan, 1986; Zizek, 2005).

In many focus groups, participants suggested solutions to the problem of Syrian refugees that involved the spatial (re)organization of bodies. Such geographical solutions seemed to represent a compromise between humanitarianism or Muslim unity and the costs to Turkish society that people perceived. Overwhelmingly, people felt that the biggest problem with Turkish policy towards the Syrian refugees was that they had not been confined to camps or to a particular region near the border, but rather had spread out to Turkish cities across the country. They suggested spatial segregation — either in camps or in the border area, or even across the border on Syrian territory — as a way to maintain a strong separation and thereby to protect the fabric of Turkish society. Of course, such a practice would be untenable given the numbers. Three million people cannot be kept in camps in Turkey, and there are no empty areas of Turkey that could be handed over to Syrian settlement. This insistence on a spatial solution manifests an affective geopolitics of fear that calls forth the demand for spatial exclusion even when such a “solution” is unrealistic.

Anxious encounters

Insofar as the AKP has presented its so-called open-door policy for Syrians as not only a humanitarian imperative but also an Islamic ethical obligation, the Turkish state has called for its citizens to expand the range of their identifications, to come closer to and become answerable to the new “others” in their midst (Figure 2). The AKP points to the precedence of Turkey’s long tradition of providing refuge for those fleeing war, especially for Muslims of eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Russia. Framing the open-door policy within a geopolitical orientation and vision of Turkey as a leader of the Muslim world, Erdoğan often mentions it in the same breath as he expresses continuing concerns for defending the Tatar Muslims in Crimea (under Russian invasion) and the Uyghur Muslims Xinjiang (under Chinese government’s tight grip), as well as Palestinians, thereby situating his Syrian refugee policy within a broader orientation towards the Muslim world (e.g. Sözcü, 2015; TCCB, 2015). In fact, currently, the same emergency response agency (AFAD) that oversees the refugee camps in Turkey is active internationally in places such as Myanmar and Somalia to serve Muslims at risk. ⁶

Despite the discursive force of Islamic ethics and a Muslim-world-focused geopolitical strategy at the national level, the idea that Turkey has a special obligation to the Syrian refugees based on shared Muslim identity was a weak strand of feeling in our focus groups. It was a statement repeated, but for the most part repeated without a great depth of feeling or commitment. In the words of a male university student in Konya, “Those people at war there, they are our brothers, of course. It could have been us in their place. But the thing is, they should not have been brought inside cities.” We noticed that in all three cities and across the span of time of our research, a statement about responsibility for Syrians based on shared Muslim identity was often followed by a “but”: e.g. but “not by letting them loose everywhere, by making them suffer and by disturbing peoples’ comfort and peace” (middle-class Sunni women in Istanbul, 22 June 2015); but “the problem is we couldn’t hold them in one area” (middle-class Sunni men in Istanbul, 23 July 2015); but “nobody would take us in if it were us.”

This latter sentiment was repeated again and again across our groups: “Nobody would take us.” The myth of Muslim unity crashes on this dark projection that if it were us, us Turks, there would be no open border — not to the south, where Iraq and Syria writhe in war, not to the east, where Iran and Russia cast hostile eyes on Sunni-aligned Turkey, and certainly not to the west, where Greece (and so the EU) lies within sight of the Turkish coast. This assertion — nobody would take us — puts the breaks on any sense of obligation towards Syrians as Muslim “brothers” and “sisters” by projecting a lack of reciprocity. And in the field of the projected failure of humanitarianism, these statements express the horror of identifying with those who have appeared in their midst as lost: this could be us. We could be in this situation ourselves. And if we were, the world would offer nothing.

We might say that the subject loves and hates the neighbor as themselves (Reinhard, 2005: 33). As Zizek (2005) argues, the other that one encounters is not only the imaginary other — that is, a person “like me,” with whom I might identify in a mirror-like relationship (in this case, fellow Muslim). This “other” of the encounter is also not only the big Other — the symbolic order that coordinates our co-existence, that frames us or fails to frame us within a humanitarian discourse. These two ways of thinking of the other (in terms of identification or interpellation) are supplemented by a third: the traumatic other qua Real, the impossible Thing. This is what Zizek calls the monstrous face of the other, the face that ambiguously reflects both the naked vulnerability of the other (as human) and something inhuman, an impossible alterity. When one encounters this face of the other, what Zizek colorfully calls the “the monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing” (2005: 163), what is traumatic is the recognition that this other, this alterity, already resides within ourselves. The displaced, abject refugee addresses the citizen as one who could also be made stateless and placeless.

The encounter with the other as an impenetrable, enigmatic presence not only calls for ethical responsibility (qua Levinas) but is characterized by anxiety — the affect that does not deceive, as Lacan (2014) so famously put it. Anxiety arises when the subject is confronted with their own constitutional incoherence. In the anxious encounter, the subject experiences the other as a provocateur that threatens to expose the worst: to reveal that the subject does not fully correspond with itself, that there is a disconcerting gap between the subject and the image of its ideal self. Anxiety is an affect of encounter because it always comes from outside the subject, originating with an external alterity that dangerously corresponds to a difference that inhabits the subject and threatens to undo it. Thus, the anxious encounter with the other is one that threatens the subject with its own disintegration.

Anxiously, our participants pushed back against this dark encounter with the Syrian refugees by asserting Turkish difference, by positing that which would prevent they themselves from suffering loss, from becoming “lost” like the refugees. They said that the Syrian refugees in Turkey were cowards — in fact, some said, the Syrians in Turkey were probably the lowest of all their countrymen, because they had fled the conflict: “If this were us, we would stay and fight. We wouldn’t leave our country just when we needed to defend it.” This was an oft repeated statement, and one that does a lot of work to foreclose identification with the refugees and, perhaps even more importantly, with the fate of Syrian state and society.

There were arguments; sometimes a participant would object that women and children could not be expected to stay and fight. But even then, the rejoinder was, “We stayed, during World War I and its aftermath, we stayed, men, women, and children, and we fought.” It is not hard to locate the fallacy of such a claim, to point out that this formulation of refugees as lily-livered betrays a basic lack of understanding of what makes a people leave behind their cities, universities, villages, farm lands, homes, families, and businesses to seek refuge in a country where they do not speak the language, where their qualifications are no longer legible, where they cannot work. This is not our point though; our point is that, while there is potential for an encounter that extends responsibility to the refugees (“It could be us.”), such mirroring is also terrifying. And so the idea that we, we Turks, could not, would not become refugees shields against the trauma of this encounter, distances the dangerously proximate neighbor, throws up a protective wall against the demands of the other.

It is not just Syrians as individuals, as neighbors, or as Muslims that provoked uneasy identifications, but also significantly and horrifyingly, the Syrian state itself. Focus group discussions elicited expressions of ambivalence around the question of Turkey’s leadership in the Middle East or the Muslim world. One of the major fears was that by engaging with Middle Eastern states Turkey risks becoming more like them. As one Alevi woman in Istanbul put it, “They are backwards countries, we will come to resemble them.” In Konya, Emre, who was a Sunni university student, expressed this fear of identification and disintegration during our focus group in December 2014:

We don’t have to intervene in Syria or anything because Syria is like a swamp now. There is still war there. If we get drawn in, we’ll attract the war onto ourselves. Because we are diverse in terms of our ethnic composition here. We are a whole. If we allow them to penetrate us, we would dissolve.

The pain of others and the question of ethics

In tracing the workings of what Ahmed might call the organization of hate, we also must remain mindful of the pain of those who are poor in Turkey, of those who are already embattled minorities (identifying as Kurds and Alevis), and of all the ways in which our research participants themselves feel abandoned by the Turkish state, feel that their wellbeing is not cared for by the AKP’s focus on both geopolitical and domestic gains filtered through the Syrian conflict. In States of Injury (1995), Wendy Brown argues that politicized identity often plants historical pain at the foundation of its political claims and thereby become attached to its own exclusion. In her words, “Politicized identity thus enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics” (Brown, 1995: 74). Such a wounded attachment to one’s own pain seemed to play a role in our focus group discussions, where demands for compassion and mercy (for the Syrians) were often countered both by resentment — “We do not get such support from the state, why do they?” — and by complaints about the everyday costs of accommodating the refugees in neighborhoods, employment markets, and an already over-taxed state healthcare system. Feelings of abandonment by the Turkish state, a wounded attachment to their own subjugated identity or position, thus mediates the presence of the (alien and alienating) pain of others. In such a heterogeneous assemblage of wounded subjects, the ongoing, everyday pain felt by the poor and the marginalized in Turkey comes up against the (humanitarian, national, and ethical) demand to feel the pain of the refugee. Such a demand falls into the disjunct that opens when one is asked to “feel” the pain of others: it flounders in the impasse produced by the irreconcilability and unsharability of pain (Scarry, 1985).

A longer excerpt from our focus group with young Sunni women in Malatya in March 2016 reprises many of the themes we have already traced out, but also brings us to the question of the ethics of responding to the pain of others:

Özlem: Well, there’s this. We say we shouldn’t discriminate but unfortunately we do. For example there are a lot of Syrians in my neighborhood and I feel very uncomfortable. Even outside my door. For example, I wasn’t able to bring in my firewood and coal because it had been taken when I was at work. I felt like fighting back. Finally I went to the mosque. The mosque is right next to my house. And I told the people there, “If you give even one penny to those people, I will not give you my blessing, because you spoil these people, they steal my firewood and my coal today, tomorrow they will come inside my house and kill me.”

The problem of the pain of others opens onto the question of ethics, of how one responds to the encounter with the other (Levinas, 2011). As Judith Butler (2012: 9) puts it, “The question of how, whether, and in what way to ‘give ground’ to the other becomes an essential part of ethical reflection.” Yet in the face of the demand for a response to the suffering of others, Özlem objects that she cannot know these others, cannot “sit down and talk” as one does with a neighbor because of the language barrier.

In the encounter with Syrian refugees, our research subjects often express this sense of being dispossessed by others who they do not know, did not choose, and of whom they cannot make sense. The demand of the other arrives unintelligibly; in this case, not only because the refugees speak Arabic, but because their social status is also illegible (in that many of our participants expressed a belief that refugees on the streets of Turkish cities had been beggars in Syria as well). As Jean Laplanche (1999) points out, the demand of the other always originates from elsewhere, arriving here and now in “partial ruin,” — “receptivity is always a matter of translation” (Butler, 2012: 10–11). Arguably, it is this challenge of what gets lost in translation, of how the encounter with the other gives rise to a demand that is not immediately legible, that confounds Özlem’s response to the ethical demand of the Syrians in her midst.

Without a common language, perhaps, as Ahmed puts it, “Our task is to learn how to hear what is impossible,” to “respond to a pain that we cannot claim as our own” (2004: 35). This “impossible hearing” is not simply a matter of individual orientations (it is not Fatma vs. Özlem). Hearing, witnessing, and responding to the unfathomable pain of others opens onto the broader geopolitical problematic of the affective encounter. Geopolitical order, or the “second-order body politic” as John Protevi (2009) would call it, is always a product of a multiplicity of (missed) encounters with the pain of others — whether we understand this pain to be the misery of refugees, the precarity and fear experienced by Alevis, the exclusion and persecution of Kurdish subjects, the subjugation of and violence against female bodies, or the exclusion and abandonment of the economically marginal. There is an incommensurability in the affective encounter, something that gets lost in translation, and it is precisely this impasse — the chasm of the impossible hearing — from which the geopolitical emerges.

Conclusion

An orientation towards geopolitics that takes seriously the role of affect in political territorializations is allied with a feminist geopolitics that understands the geopolitical to emerge in the ordinary and extraordinary places, neighborhoods and camps, where it courses through the material context of bodies and spaces (Massaro and Williams, 2013). In this vein, we have analyzed some of the affective dimensions of Turkey’s Syrian policy from the perspective of diverse residents of three Turkish cities at a time when things were (and still are at the time of this writing) in rapid flux. We have traced in these conversations how encounter works not simply to create a positive commonality — a shared fate as Muslims — but also to call forth disturbing recognitions: of the divisions in Turkish society, for example, that mirror those in Syria, and the potential for Turkey to import the conflict either by its involvement in regional geopolitics as a Sunni actor or by opening a door — a door which, according to many, is more like a filter that catches Kurds and Alevis and keeps them at bay while allowing a flow of Sunni Arabs and Turkmen.

The affective encounters we have drawn out might be considered “bad encounters” (Ahmed, 2010). Delving into the weeds of anxiety, hatred, and the gulf that opens when one is asked to consider the pain of others, we nonetheless situate ethics upon this muddy affective terrain; as Levinas (2011) suggests, we find that “the subject’s affective disposition towards alterity is the condition of possibility for the ethical relation to the other” (Critchley, 1999: 194). We do not want to excuse or minimize the racism expressed in our focus groups, but we must acknowledge the scale of the refugee influx, the poverty of those most affected, and the reality of the problems associated with the distribution of resources. The real impasses that the arrival of nearly three million refugees can generate are not easily patched up with rhetoric or geopolitical strategy. The low odds of third country resettlement, the lack of any end in sight of the Syrian war, and the lack of a path to citizenship for the refugees in Turkey has produced an uncomfortable limbo, both for refugees and citizens of Turkey. In this context, Erdoğan has more recently been entertaining the possibility of granting citizenship to Syrians, mostly citing economic benefits (BBC Turkish, 2016, 2017). Here, once again (as with the open-door policy) the gap between AKP policy and the feelings of the populace become apparent. A 2014 national survey found that 85% of Turkish adults did not favor citizenship for Syrians (Erdoğan, 2014). This gap further reinforces Rachel Pain’s (2009) criticism of the proliferating work on global fear and the problematic assumption that discourses deployed to manipulate people’s feelings by political actors and their various institutions are reflected and experienced in the emotions of ordinary people in daily life.

Beyond marking this disjuncture, what we learn from our focus groups is how concrete encounters taking place in city spaces produce a localized, embodied, and affective set of geopolitical coordinates. Bringing what was distant into jarring proximity, these encounters are geopolitical foldings that spark a reckoning with difference at the same time as they expose the entanglement of lives. The anxious encounter with the un-asked for neighbor, a neighbor who is both unfathomable in their difference and frightening in their sameness, incites the desire to un-mix the concoction, to undo the problem of difference in the encounter by creating territorial and racialized enclosures that reassert a spatial logic in which there is a strict and recognizable difference between “us” and “them.” It is in this sense that geopolitics (re)generates in the impasse of untranslatable encounters. Our challenge is to refuse these racialized (re)territorializations of geopolitics and instead to learn how to inhabit this impasse (Secor and Linz, 2017), to remain proximate, and (if need be) to weather the anxiety of the encounter in order that we may become witness to what is impossible to hear: the pain of others. Attending to affect — to the production, circulation, and effects of “political feeling” — is not an exercise of turning globally writ geopolitics on its head. This is geopolitics.