Date of Award

5-11-2025

Date Published

June 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

Advisor(s)

Edwin Ackerman

Keywords

Autonomy of Migration;Border Securitization;European Border Regime;Liminality;Prolonged Immobility;Transit Migration

Subject Categories

Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology

Abstract

This dissertation explores the lived experiences of migrants stranded in prolonged transit amid the intensifying securitization of the European border regime. While contemporary policy frameworks aim to deter unauthorized migration through externalized controls, digital surveillance, and restricted legal pathways, these measures have instead produced new forms of precarity, immobilization, and liminal existence. Focusing on Istanbul as a key site of transit and containment, the research examines how migrants navigate conditions of legal uncertainty, economic marginalization, and social isolation while resisting the structural constraints imposed upon them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Istanbul—including semi-structured interviews and participant observation—this study adopts a qualitative, interpretivist methodology to foreground migrants’ voices and meaning-making processes. The research conceptualizes migrants not as passive victims of border regimes but as active agents who engage in creative forms of survival, resistance, and relationality. These include informal labor practices, knowledge-sharing networks, and the cultivation of mutual aid communities that together constitute what this dissertation refers to as “social excess”, exceeding and subverting state- imposed limits. At the center of this inquiry is the notion of prolonged liminality, a condition in which migrants remain suspended between departure and destination, caught in spaces of extended waiting and strategic uncertainty. While often framed as temporary, transit becomes an enduring reality with deep psychological, social, and spatial consequences. Migrants experience being “terminally stranded,” for they are neither able to move forward nor return, leading to evolving aspirations, altered identities, and reconfigured relationships to time and place. By analyzing how migrants rework the boundaries of state control and assert new forms of agency under duress, this dissertation contributes to key debates in migration studies, border politics, and critical urbanism. It challenges conventional migration models that assume clear trajectories from origin to destination. It also highlight resillience without normalizing systemic violence. In doing so, it brings attention to the enduring harm of deterrence-based policies, the psychological burden of prolonged uncertainty, and the geopolitical implications of externalized migration governance. Ultimately, this work calls for a fundamental rethinking of migration policy—one that acknowledges migrants’ rights to mobility and dignity, attends to the ignored and externalized consequences of border securitization, and fosters more just and sustainable frameworks of global cooperation. By situating Istanbul as a microcosm of broader dynamics, the dissertation illuminates the lived contradictions at the heart of contemporary migration governance, where human mobility is simultaneously managed, deferred, and made to endure.

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Open Access

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