Suriyeli mülteciler ile Türkiye Cumhuriyeti vatandaşlarının karşılıklı algısı: İstanbul Avrupa yakası örneği

The impacts of the Arab Spring, which started in 2010 in Tunisia, spread to many countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa in a very short period of time. The process in Syria, which began as regional conflicts in March, 2011, incrementally turned into a civil war which affected so many people in social, economic and political terms. Within the 7 years since the beginning of the civil war, 3.6 million registered refugees who fled from Syria, came to Turkey. Istanbul accommodates 550 thousand of them. This study aims to learn and explain the mutual perceptions of Syrian refugees and Turkish citizens who live in the European side of Istanbul in economic, social and political means. The research focuses on the zones where these two groups intersect, interact and contact. In this respect, the economic questions about the rise of rental rates, the competition in the labour market and wage discrimination; the socio-political questions about the effects of religion, the ways of perceiving cultural values, and the political impacts of the media and ideologies on this perception were explored. In this study, qualitative research methods were utilized in the districts of Fatih, Esenyurt, Bayrampaşa and Bakırköy which are located in the European side of Istanbul. The various towns and districts selected enabled a general representativeness and comparability with respect to their social, economic, political differences and varying percentages of the Syrians within the community. In this respect, the other elements of perception such as the quality/quantity of the contact were also evaluated.