Historical Memory of Asylum Policy in Turkey: Ottoman Legacies and Syrian Refugee `Crisis` Challenges

Asylum policies are not only bunch of laws and regulations drawn on the registers by the power institutions. Instead, they are social structures that evolve within certain historical context and under various historical moments and developments. They have their historical memories of social learning and construction. Placed at the crossroad of Europe, Middle East, Eurasia and Africa Turkey has been both country of transit and asylum that accumulated a long and diverse memory of forced immigrations. The following study investigates in what ways Turkey use to approach and manage all these asylum movements and how Ottoman asylum policy and experience found reflection on its current asylum policy towards Syrian refugee flows? Is there historical continuity in its asylum policies? What are the turning points and changes in the historical development of its asylum policies and practices? At what manner Europeanisation encountered the Ottoman legacies in the field of asylum? How all those challenges and continuities found reflection in the temporary protection policy towards the Syrian refugee flow?