Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - MERGE - Migration and the Middle East

Powered by Secrecy: Contesting Imaginaries of Migration Governance in Turkey

A MERGE discussion with Dr. Sibel Karadağ and Dr. Doruk Tatar, Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

Date: December 4th, 2025

Time: 16:00-18:00

Location: Room 408, Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße 40-41

 

Based on their article, Dr. Sibel Karadağ and Dr. Doruk Tatar, in this MERGE discussion, examine the role of secrecy in shaping migration governance in Turkey. Building on recent scholarship on migration, borders, and the institutional production of non-knowledge, it explores how civil society actors perceive, contest, and reconfigure secrecy in their encounters with state authorities. The extensive use of secrecy engenders perceptions that vacillate between two opposing imaginaries: the central migration authority as an incompetent entity and as an omnipotent security agency. By rethinking Luc Boltanski’s notion of domination, it proposes that this undecidability operates as a distinctive mode of power, one that destabilises reality and paralyses response. 

A follow-up discussion with Dr. Nader Talebi will invite participants to reflect on the broader implications of secrecy and opacity in the governance of migration.

 

  • Dr. Sibel Karadağ is an assistant professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. She is a former Fulbright scholar at Yale University. Karadağ serves on the Governing Board of EISA and Board of Border Forensics which investigates violence and human rights violations at borders. Her research interest lies mainly in critical security and border studies, migration and mobility, labour studies, and international political sociology. In addition to numerous international projects and edited books she contributed, her articles have been published in the journals, including Geopolitics, Security Dialogue, Journal of Refugee Studies, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, Turkish Studies, and Comparative Migration Studies. She has a decade-long field experience on the Aegean Sea, Evros River, and border/migration policies in Turkey.

 

 

 

 

  • Dr. Doruk Tatar is an assistant professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2019. His doctoral dissertation titled “On Guard Against Contamination: Espionage, Conspiracism, and Imperial Nostalgia in British and Turkish Literatures” focuses on the themes of espionage, paranoia, and conspiracy by looking at the different reactions given by Turkish and British literatures to imperial crisis. His research interests fall mainly in the 20th century British and Turkish literatures, continental philosophy and critical theory, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and crime fiction.