Dr. Ibrahim Sirkeci is Lecturer at the European Business School of Regent’s College, London. A population geography specialist, he has contributed numerous articles to books, learned journals and conferences. He is the editor of Migration Letters, an international letter-type scholarly journal.
2006 0-7734-5739-9 This excellent research, with particular focus on an understudied ethnic group, competently draws linkages between ethnic conflict, international migration, and individual strategies and networks. It triangulates quantitative survey data with narratives collected through in-depth interviews providing insights of Turkey’s Kurds migration experiences. Successfully applying a novel conceptual tool, ‘environment of insecurity,’ the book explains migration and ethnicity nexus in a multidimensional approach benefiting from a variety of models used in migration studies literature. Strongly erasing the borders between typologies of migrants, this study comes up with another conceptual novelty: ‘opportunity frameworks’ which can be applied to many other ethnic conflict involved migration regimes. Readers are attracted to the cunning combination of different types of data and methods: First, identifying a Kurdish place within Turkish international migratory regime; then revealing how migrants position themselves against the ethnic conflict, migration restrictions, socioeconomic and political deprivation in order to move from an absolute environment of insecurity to an environment of relative security. Analysis of Turkish Kurds international migration to Cologne comes with a succinct account of Kurdish ethnic rivalry in Turkey and a concise story of international migration from Turkey to Germany.