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Refugee commodification, or the use of refugee hosting to extract political and economic concessions, has attracted growing scholarly attention in recent years. Yet, studies tend to focus on its international component, neglecting the domestic political space and how these extractions impact domestic political dynamics. To address this gap, we ask: how does refugee commodification influence domestic politics? Our study focuses on the Republican People's Party (CHP) in Turkey, in order to assess the political implications of refugee commodification within domestic politics. Through a mixed qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews with opposition politicians and an analysis of policy documents, we examine the nexus of international and domestic spheres, assessing how political actors beyond the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) engage in, react to, and employ refugee commodification strategies. The findings of this study have implications beyond Turkey, demonstrating the transformative effects of refugee commodification for domestic politics across Global South states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some host community members (HCMs) develop positive attitudes toward refugees, while others do not. The current literature on perceptions of refugees offers different explanations for these varied responses to intergroup encounters (positive contact, negative contact, and exposure). Nevertheless, few scholars have examined the outcomes of intergroup relations at the microlevel to better understand the various impacts of intergroup encounters between HCMs and refugees. Even fewer scholars have focused on the everyday implications of HCMs' attitudes toward refugees in response to changing local demographics. In this article, I argue that in addition to the type of intergroup encounters, the locations where these encounters occur at the neighborhood level serve as a critical factor in understanding HCMs' sociospatial attitudes or their attitudes toward refugees at the microlevel of everyday life. In doing so, I introduce the concept of everyday strategies to describe the sociospatial attitudes that HCMs adopt in different types of urban public spaces following their encounters with refugees in neighborhoods that have experienced a large refugee influx. Empirically, the analysis draws on interviews conducted with 60 HCMs in Bursa, Turkey, in 2018 and, through the concept of everyday strategies, extends the literature on HCMs' attitudes regarding refugees. Overall, this article contributes to the wider study of international migration by detailing the influence of microlevel intergroup encounters on HCMs' sociospatial attitudes in a South-South forced migration context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debates on positionality in migration studies by introducing assigned insider as a new category. I define it as a position when both the interviewees and the researcher are of the same local origin in which the researcher is considered 'an insider of the host community' and the interview questions are about a migrant group. I developed this category based on interviews with host community members during my field study in Bursa, Turkey, where I was born and raised. Previous studies focused on the researcher being an insider from a migrant community or being an outsider conducting research on a migrant community different from his/her own. Assigned insider has two elements that require it to be considered differently: same local origin operates as an overriding feature that goes beyond ethnicity and the interviewees being from the host community involves different ethical aspects than that from a migrant community. I argue that these reflect on the researcher during the interviews through active and passive discontent manifestations of the interviewees. While the former emphasises the direct confrontations of the interviewees that lead them to 'correct' the researcher, the latter manifests itself through non-verbal ways, which can result in refraining from answering questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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