Refugee community organisations: capabilities, interactions and limitations

Abstract

This article focuses on ways in which refugee-led community organisations (RCOs) carve out a space of influence through civic activism in the migration architectures of receiving countries. Building on scholarship addressing migration governance and grassroots refugee organisations, it argues that RCOs have become vital in the refugees’ search for means to alleviate the sufferings of their fellows, to empower their community and claim rights for an improvement of their conditions. The notions of invented and invited spaces are convenient to describe opportunities, limitations and the ways of interactions encountered by emerging formal and informal RCOs. Drawing on qualitative data obtained from Syrian RCOs and governance actors in Turkey, the article demonstrates how increasing numbers of RCOs operate in the invited spaces opened by the state agencies and international donors. Only rarely, however, are RCOs able to invent spaces to change existing power relations, as Turkey’s political context categorically opposes rights-based advocacy of any marginalised group, and the national refugee governance is based on temporary protection. The findings can serve to analyse the dynamics of new refugee groups’ collective actions as well as their interactions with governance actors at transnational, national and local levels.