Extraterritorial Contention: : Diasporic Anti-authoritarian Contentious Politics of Syrian Refugees in Europe and Turkey

Sharkawi, T. and Suchman, Lucy (2024) Extraterritorial Contention: : Diasporic Anti-authoritarian Contentious Politics of Syrian Refugees in Europe and Turkey. PhD thesis, Sociology.

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Abstract

This work seeks to contribute to the sociological and political debates on transnational social movements and forms of border-crossing organizing within the contentious politics approach by drawing on the scholarship on long-distance nationalism to introduce the notion of extraterritoriality to examine spatially configured practices in border-crossing contention by non-state actors making domestic claims directed towards state actors of a polity they belong to or have a membership of. The theoretical argument of this thesis adopts interdisciplinary perspectives to synthesize theoretical approaches developed in social movement studies, long-distance nationalism in migration studies, political performativity, and digital literacy studies. The thesis builds on longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and digital ethnography of post-2014 diasporic Syrian organizing and mobilizing, examining 1) cycles of extraterritorial protests in relation to domestic contention in Syria, 2) three response campaigns and memorialization protests, and 3) the coalescing of a decade worth of protest activism and campaigns into an extraterritorial anti-authoritarian movement with significant implications for transitional justice in Syria and beyond. Addressing theoretical and methodological challenges emerging from analyses of the ethnographic research materials, this work develops the notion of extraterritorial contention as a conceptual and analytic tool to expand on the study of diasporic collective action within the field of social movement studies. The thesis seeks to contribute to the field of social movement studies by examining extraterritorial forms of organizing and mobilizing as a sociopolitical phenomenon in the context of Twenty-First-century global migration and digital technologies.