Penalizing migration and a culture of impunity: The case of Turkey’s unwanted noncitizens

This chapter unpacks the notion of bordered penalty in the Turkish context, one of the major refugee-receiving countries in the world in the last decade. We take stock of and examine the social and political forces behind, on the one hand, the increasing border enforcement and forced return, and on the other hand, discrimination, hate speech, and attacks on “unwanted” noncitizens that have become more mundane, even overtly nurtured by politicians. We argue that this is highly related to the history of injustices and concomitant impunity for the crimes against ethnic and religious minorities that the nation building process has repeatedly marked and excluded as national Others. The prevailing culture of impunity for crimes against unwanted citizens makes the country a fertile ground for such atrocities against today's unwanted noncitizens. Turkish case helps us think through the notion of the bordered penalty against the background of impunity, a key aspect that leads to a Janus-faced criminal justice system, which both criminalizes noncitizens and gives leeway to parallel justice-seeking practices by de-criminalizing citizen or state-led violence. Based on this analysis, we suggest expanding our analytical gaze on bordered penalty to include historical-structural interlinkages between nationalism, religion, and citizenship.