Belonging to Imbros: citizenship and sovereignty in the Turkish Republic

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the narratives and practices of belonging in Imbros, and the implications of those narratives and practices of belonging related to the larger issues of governmentality and sovereignty in Turkey in general. Based on the ethnographic analysis of the island along with the narrative analysis of the interviews conducted during the fieldwork, it intends to address migration and belonging as issues of governmentality and sovereignty. In that sense, the thesis aims to problematize the concept of citizenship with regard to its relation to power and authority. It claims that the emergence of citizenship in the republican Turkey refers to a cultural process of subjectivation and a form of governmentality through the regulation of the legitimate way of belonging to a place within the national borders.Through the definition of Imbros in terms of marginal and exceptional, where the contestations over belonging take place currently, this thesis argues that looking at the ways in which these terms operate on the island reveals the undeclared of the republican citizenship and governmentality related to ethnicity, religion, nativeness, land and locality.