The Precarious Lives of Syrians: A Review of Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan and Kim Rygiel’s the Precarious Lives of Syrians: Migration, Citizenship and Temporary Protection in Turkey. By Feyzi Baban, Suzan Ilcan and Kim Rygiel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twelve years on from the outbreak of war in Syria, and there remain over 12 million displaced Syrians. Approximately 6.8 million are internally displaced, while 5.4 million reside in neighbouring countries. Turkey hosts more Syrians than any other country, having initially opened its borders to Syrians as guests in 2011 before developing temporary protection regulations for Syrians in 2014. The Precarious Lives of Syrians focuses attention specifically on the situation of those living under temporary protection in Turkey, namely, those who have ‘the right to enter or remain in a country for a limited time due to the risk of serious harm in their home country’ (p. 38). Rather than enhancing protection, the authors caution that temporary protection regulations often place ‘Syrians in greater precarity, without permanent pathways to permanent residency or citizenship’ (p. 4). The authors of the book are all currently based at Canadian institutions and come from various disciplinary backgrounds: Sociology (Ilcan), Political Science (Rygiel), and International Development (Baban). Together, they focus on what they call an ‘architecture of precarity’ (Ilcan et al. 2018) involving three ‘layers of scaffolding: precarious status, precarious space and precarious movement’ (p. 8). Precarious status refers to socio-legal statuses, in this case, temporary protection, while precarious space refers to socio-spatial domains and everyday experiences of precarity. Precarious movement refers to governing practices that deny rights in transit, detention, and relocation. Beyond simply focusing on the problems of precarity (Chapters 2–4), however, the authors also focus on the ways that Syrians actively negotiate and resist such conditions through community initiatives (Chapter 5) and by undertaking onward journeys to resettlement elsewhere (Chapter 6).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".