Beste İşleyen is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches International Relations, Decolonial/Postcolonial Studies and European politics. Her research addresses conceptual and empirical questions of border security, territoriality, technology and practices. She is presently a Governing Board member (2021-2025) of the European International Studies Association and Editor (2022-2027) of International Political Sociology. İşleyen acts as the co-leader of the ‘Europe in the World’ theme of Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) Amsterdam Centre for European Studies, and co-convener (with Tasniem Anwar) of the ACES Online Series ‘Decolonising Europe’ Decolonising Europe. 

Isleyen’s research on migration and border governance in Turkey, TRANSIT (2015-2019), was funded by a VENI grant by the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO). This interview engages a recent outcome of this project that examines Turkey’s coastal radar technology as an evolving border security infrastructure in the Aegean Sea and glances at the developing trajectories of this work.

In your recent article on Turkey’s coastal radar technology, you invoke a productive ground between International Relations research and STS by bringing an “object” of border policing into focus — the HAVELSAN Coastal Surveillance Radar System used for controlling irregular migration across the Aegean Sea. Your conclusion on the agency of surveillance technologies in producing new forms of territorial engagement was particularly intriguing for me. How do you consider a technologically-oriented reading to inform your earlier findings and analysis of Turkey’s migration/security nexus?

My earlier work looks into Turkey’s daily governance of borders and migration. It builds on an inductive analysis of my fieldwork at Turkey’s borders with the European Union (EU). Drawing on a Foucauldian reading of security, it brings together critical security studies and the political geography scholarship to examine border security as practice — and understand these practices as sites that should be studied on their own, rather than as mere reflections of policies adopted at a higher level. During this fieldwork, I identified several technological tools that Turkish border practices rely on for enacting and translating certain security understandings into the governance of borders and migration, such as checkpoints and identity documents. Technology, in this reading, is considered an intermediary; it remains secondary to security and territorial logics.

An STS understanding, however, conceptualizes technology as having the ability to “make a difference in the course of some other agent’s action” (Latour 2005, 71). In my recent work on the HAVELSAN Coastal Surveillance Radar System, I employ an STS-driven analysis to examine border security technology. I argue that this technology’s deployment brings certain security understanding or territorial engagements into being in the Aegean Sea. This analysis complements the conventional reading of the Aegean Sea as a conflictual space between two nation-states — in which technology is understood to pursue or support the state’s (existing) security interest, for example, by augmenting its surveillance capabilities of the “enemy.” In the deployment of Turkey’s coastal radar technology, however, we see that these conflictual understandings do not cease to exist; yet, a nonconflictual way of managing or perceiving territory comes into play. My latest work thus examines how new objects and subjects of security emerge through these technologies.

So in the Turkish-Greek context, a nonconflictual reading of the Aegean Sea doesn’t exist prior to the deployment of these technologies?

This is how the International Relations (IR) literature has approached this territory so far. Regardless of brief periods of rapprochement, Turkey’s (presently frozen) accession to the EU and both Greece and Turkey being NATO members, the Aegean Sea has been shaped by interstate conflict. Bahar Rumelili, a prominent scholar working on the subject, argues that the Greek-Turkish conflict over the Aegean Sea represents an anomaly in IR scholarship. In IR scholarship, it is assumed that if two countries are part of the same security framework, socialization will occur. With time, such socialization will impact their relations, for they will engage in more cooperative exchanges. However, we do not observe such a transformative effect of international institutions on Greek-Turkish relations. Accordingly, the main framework to analyze the Aegean Sea has always maintained this state-centric, conflictual understanding of security.

However, the deployment of the HAVELSAN radar technology in the migration/security nexus of the Aegean Sea brings into existence new and nonconflictual interstate practices – including different degrees of cooperation between Greece and Turkey. One example is data-sharing practices for migrant interception operations. This occurs without a radical transformation of state interests concerning the Aegean. It is through technology that these cooperative arrangements take place, which would conventionally be unimaginable under the nation-state security framework. 

You have been building on extensive fieldwork of interviews and participant observation in your study of irregular migration governance in Turkey. These involve dialogues with several border security professionals such as police officers, customs officers, coast guard officials and government personnel. How did you navigate these contacts in terms of gaining access, face-to-face interactions, and on-site observation — given the (presumably) sensitive nature of these settings?

Security is already a field which is very much shaped by secrecy. It is common for researchers to have concerns regarding field access and data gathering through interviews and participant observation. In my case, I went to the field immediately, starting with the border in Edirne, and began knocking on doors — introducing myself and trying to get state officials’ attention to secure an interview. Edirne is also a small town, so the police already knew of my arrival. Soon, I was invited to their department. I informed the chief of police about my research over tea, and already in this brief interaction, I learned so much from this person, who also made phone calls to refer me to other colleagues. And this is how it usually worked in the field, like a snowball effect: once I met someone for an interview, I would always ask this person for additional contacts — and in the end, you obtain a good sample. So, I think it is important that we question the myth of a “perfect fieldwork”, where everything can be planned ahead with precision. Fieldwork is very much about navigating the field with a mix of formal and informal steps and practices; and trust-building is an important component of this.

But there were also moments when good relations with one institution did not translate into another. I had very good interactions with the Police Department and the border guards in Edirne. However, when I intended to speak to the customs officers (the unit responsible for checking border-crossing vehicles), I was completely shut down by the head of their department — who suggested I should instead report to the EU how Turkish work at the border was meticulous. I don’t know why he had the impression that I was a reporter or an official coming from the EU, but it was a disappointing episode in my fieldwork. That day, thinking that my institutional access had been completely blocked, I went downstairs to the garden and sat down by the sidewalk next to the border posts. After one hour or so, an officer brought me tea, saying, “I have been seeing you for a while,” — which allowed me to introduce myself and my research. Upon this casual interaction, I conducted interviews there for three days. 

So, in my case, fieldwork was necessary to see what was implemented practically, for information on day-to-day operations was not available through formal channels. The visits extended from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. They were mainly about spending extended periods in border cities, meeting with people daily, asking them for additional contacts, and trying to build trust.

A few months back, I had the chance to catch your STS-MIGTEC presentations on the “non-Western” histories of border security technologies. You introduced your ongoing work on the early twentieth-century practices of coastal security as exercised by the Ottoman Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean. The historical focus seems to distinguish this study from your earlier research. How do you position this project in relation to your previous work?

My interviews with civil servants in my earlier fieldwork didn’t lead to very convincing answers as to how certain day-to-day border security techniques emerged in this geographical context, because my respondents were serving in office for only a couple of years — a strategy for averting clientelist networks. This leaves a very short institutional memory to work with. 

Turning to historical resources, I found clues on the origins of certain practices for managing migration at borders, some of which go as far as a century back. These clues also led me to theoretical questions concerning technologies, territory, and migration control — the literature on which, I believe, is still very Eurocentric. By Eurocentrism, I’m pointing to an underlying assumption that EU interests and demands determine border security in Turkey.Drawing on postcolonial studies and historical resources, I hence asked, “what if we approach border and migration control from a historical perspective to trace its multiple sources and geographies of emergence and evolution?” 

Anyone familiar with Turkish Republican history knows that both immigration and emigration have repeatedly concerned Turkey: for example, without going too far, the mass displacement of people following the Balkan wars in the early 1990s or the arrival of Bulgarian nationals in Turkey at the end of the Cold War. These are only a few examples among many. I argue that we need to study histories beyond Europe in order to enrich our empirical understanding of how modern migration control has developed across time and space. This is where I’m heading at the moment.