Bottom up security preassure: Analysis of the security framing of Syrians in Turkey on Twitter

Over time, Turkey has become a country of immigration from an emigration country. The most recent example of this is the Syrian migration to Turkey after the civil war in Syria in 2011. Although government officials in Turkey have emphasized the humanitarian dimension towards Syrians since the beginning of the crisis, the perception of the host community has varied greatly. Although the policy of acting with the perception of a security threat in the border region with Syria was adopted, it was seen that the Syrians were not taken into the security area by the state. In this thesis, it was found appropriate to use the Securitization Theory for the analysis of the construction of Syrians as a security threat from a societal level. Twitter, a social media platform that people can use to express their thoughts, was chosen in order to analyze that security construction in Turkey is supported not only by elite discourses but also by the public. For the analysis made on Twitter, datas containing the words "Syrian" or "Syrians" were collected between January 2011 and December 2022. With the conceptualizations and common dimensions obtained as a result of the literature review, quantitative and qualitative findings on the security threat perceptions of the analyzed Tweets built on the social dimension, crime dimension, economic dimension and political dimensions has been shared.