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This article summarizes main trends, issues, actors, and activities regarding the operation and extension of human trafficking and smuggling via irregular border crossings in the Middle East. Its premise is that rather than the obvious involvement of hierarchical mafia-type organized crime groups, globally articulated networks of locally operating independent, individual groups comprise the essential foundation for human trafficking and smuggling in the region. The available empirical evidence first suggests that elaborating on various aspects of human trafficking and smuggling is a delicate task and any consideration of priorities for data collection and analysis on these activities must start with a clear idea of the information needed and how to obtain that information. Given the highly sensitive nature of trafficking and smuggling issues, there is no simple research practice that can satisfy all these concerns. It is within this context that our analysis here only offers some partial explanation of the complex nature of human trafficking and smuggling in the Middle East. The data used here provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first primary, reliable, and representative information on traffickers and smugglers as they come directly from the narratives of the traffickers and smugglers interviewed.Evidence from our fieldwork in Turkey during the last five years indicates that the ongoing pattern of human trafficking and smuggling in the region is the outcome of quite complex interactions among locally operating individuals 26 Içduygu and Toktas and groups, with the simultaneous and sequential operation of a variety of interacting factors, including the presence of interpersonal trust relations between human traffickers and smugglers and the migrants, and the existence of national-, ethnic-, kinship-, friendship-based networks spanning countries of origin, of transit, and of destination worldwide. The study has confirmed that the nature of trafficking and smuggling in the Middle East is quite different from similar activities found elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, the study concludes that we should not disregard these issues from the perspective of criminal justice and human rights.

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This article examines the effect that a poor structural context, what we term an "environment of insecurity", has on the Kurdish ethnic nationalist mobilization in Turkey. The empirical evidence for this analysis is based on data from the 1993 Turkish Demographic and Health Survey [TDHS]. The data provide, to the best of our knowledge, the rst reliable and representative gures on the situation of Kurds in Turkey. Our key claim is that the Kurdish population in Turkey is relatively much worse off than the Turkish population in the country. This claim is strongly supported by the data. Many other factors also account for the ethnic nationalist mobilization, but we argue that the Turkish Kurds' environment of insecurity, materially and nonmaterially, stands out as a key package of both causal and intermediate variables behind the ethnic revival.

Discussions of transit migration in Europe and its peripheries are not simply descriptions of an existing reality, but to some extent also a part of the process of constructing that reality in such a way that discursive practices enable policy statements to conceptualise and talk about this phenomenon. The main goal of this paper is to explore this process through the politicisation of transit migration in Europe, with a particular focus on Turkey. The essay first documents the irregular and transit migration experience of Turkey in the last thirty years with the help of several data sets. It particularly emphasises that there is a reality of transit migration in Turkey, but that there also exists other forms of irregular labour migration. The paper focuses on transit migration in Europe in the next section. It draws attention to the rather ironic fact that, while most European countries have adopted a range of restrictive control systems against incoming migrant flows, especially in the wake of September 11, their economies have been able to absorb thousands of irregular migrants. An important consequence of the economisation and securitisation of the European international migratory regime has been the politicisation of transit migration, precipitating an obsession with transit migration on the peripheries of the continent. Drawing on the insights from this discussion on politicisation of transit migration, in the following section, the paper examines the way in which transit migration in Turkey has been approached in Europe in the context of the country's accession negotiation process with the European Union. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.