Self-fulfilling policy : the expert politics of academic research and NGO advocacy among the Dom in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.

Abstract

Over the past decade, attention on the Dom has greatly increased policy research institutions, NGOs and the media. The Dom are considered to be an already-disadvantaged community who, with the start of the Syrian civil war, are now also seen as a particularly vulnerable group among Syrian refugees in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. This master’s project seeks to explore how the Dom are represented in the policy and advocacy discourse, and to understand the implications of this representation. The project argues that Dom identity in the policy literature is not an objective concept but rather a contextually imagined, constructed and contested identity mostly created through scientific and expert knowledge production. In a top-down process, this identity is loosely applied to various groups who are not bound by language, geography or self-affiliation. Instead, the constructed identity is based on the notion that the Dom all face the same problems of exclusion and discrimination, coupled with a claim that asserts a shared ethnic background. Together these features configure the Dom identity as a homogeneous, fixed and objective concept. This paper illustrates that the construction of the Dom by experts, through policy research, builds upon a long-standing conceptualization of the Gypsies, starting from the early discourse of European Gypsylorists in the 18th century. It argues that the Dom category in the policy discourse is highly ambiguous and contested, thus giving ground to experts to mediate between the policy subjects and the policy community. It paradoxically limits the political power of those who are ascribed to the Dom category, requiring them to approve external ascription as a self-ascription before they can participate in relevant political discourse. This project also looks at how the policy literature confusingly portrays the Dom both as an ethnic minority and as a disadvantaged group. Within this racial framework for the policy, the Dom are represented as both eternally vulnerable and essentially