Demographic Anxiety in Turkey

Sefa Secen is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the co-author of The Muslim World in International Relations: Discourse, Power, and Pluralism in Global Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2026) and Demographic Anxiety in Turkey: Migration, Identity, and Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2026). His research has appeared in or is forthcoming in leading academic journals, including Perspectives on Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Political Behavior, Journal of Global Security Studies, Third World Quarterly, and Politics, Groups, and Identities, as well as public-facing outlets such as TIME, The Washington Post, and The Conversation. Serhun Al received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Utah in 2015. He is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Izmir University of Economics, Turkey. He was a visiting scholar at Ohio State University during the 2022-23 academic year. His research interests include politics of identity, nationalism and ethnic conflict, and security studies within the context of modern Turkey and the Kurdish Middle East. He is the author of Patterns of Nationhood and Saving the State in Turkey (Routledge, 2019) and the co-editor of Comparative Kurdish Politics in the Middle East (Palgrave, 2018). His articles have been published in journals such as Ethnopolitics, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism, Nationalities Papers, Globalizations, Journal of International Relations and Development, Turkish Studies, and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies.

• Table of ContentsList of FiguresAbout the AuthorsAcknowledgementsAbbreviations1. Introduction: Migration and the Age of Demographic Anxiety2. Theoretical Frameworks and Methodology3. Reconfiguring the Nation: Transformations in Identity and Turkish Nationalism from Atatürk to Erdoğan4. History of Migration in Turkey5. From the Arab Spring to the Refugee Influx: Repositioning Turkey in the New Middle East6. EU-Turkey Relations in the Refugee Crisis7. Arabs In, Turks Out: Emigrations from Erdoğan's Turkey8. Refugees, Far Right and New Electoral Dynamics9. Conclusion: The Age of Demographic Anxiety in Turkey and BeyondBibliographyIndex

This book highlights a critical issue: many post-nation-states are grappling with demographic anxiety. Using Turkey as a case study, which faces both emigration and immigration challenges, the book shows how demographic anxieties have emerged since the Syrian refugee crisis began in 2011. Secen & Al employ structural, discursive, psychological, and strategic approaches to offer a comprehensive, multidimensional analysis that is both theoretically solid and empirically detailed.