Racial Subsumption: A Historical Materialist Analysis of Syrian Refugee Governance in the Longue Durée of Turkish Capitalism

Turkey hosts 2.7 million Syrian refugees under Temporary Protection and, since the 2016 EU–Turkey Deal, has become a key containment space where displaced people are immobilised and absorbed into export-oriented sectors under exploitative conditions. Syrians remain economically central as labour, while they are governed through surveillance, detention, deportation, and recurrent racialized violence. I ask why repression and impunity persist despite dependence on Syrian labour. I answer by locating Syrian refugee governance within the longue durée of Turkish capitalism and argue that repression and racialized violence are integral to the social reproduction of Syrian labour as exploitable and deportable. I develop a historical materialist framework that synthesises Marxian Political Economy and Critical Race Theory through racial subsumption, a state-mediated process through which accumulation fuses expropriation and exploitation, stabilising their effects as racialized difference. I conceptualise two limit outcomes. Eliminated surplus populations (ESPs) name populations expelled from the territorial space of accumulation through dispossession, removal, and erasure. Variegated relative surplus populations (VRSPs) name populations incorporated into labour markets through legal precarity and coercive devaluation, as segmented labour whose low bargaining power is structurally available to capital. Racial subsumption operates through three linked techniques, coercion, codification, and consent (3Cs), organising elimination, subordinate incorporation, and their normalisation. Empirically, I centre Istanbul across three conjunctures. From 1908 to 1960, genocide, expulsion, exceptional taxation, and pogroms targeting Armenians, Greeks, and Jews transferred property, consolidated a national bourgeoisie, and defined Turkishness against non-Muslims, positioning them as ESPs. From 1980 to 2000, Kurdish internal displacement and criminalisation enabled subordinate incorporation into informal, export-oriented labour markets, while redefining Turkishness against Kurds, positioning displaced Kurdish workers as VRSPs. From 2014 to 2024, the EU–Turkey Deal, Temporary Protection law, zoning, deportation, and state-sanctioned racial violence operate as a regime that reproduces Syrians as the cheapest segment of Turkey’s labour force, while redefining Turkishness against Arabs, positioning Syrian refugees as VRSPs. Substantively, I explain how Turkish capitalism has produced variegated surplus populations across a spectrum of subordinate incorporation and disposability. Theoretically, I specify a mechanism linking racialization to accumulation across the longue durée through fusion of coercion, codification, and consent.

Department dc:contributor.department

Political Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Sahin, Canan

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Soederberg, Susanne

• Turkish Capitalism
• State Formation
• Capitalist Development
• Racism
• Labour Subsumption
• Refugee Governance
• Variegated Relative Surplus Populations
• Racialized Primitive Accumulation
• Exploitation and Expropriation
• Racialized Capital Accumulation

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1974/36200

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/36200