Welcome back to our podcast series, "Crossing the Aegean: A Century of People on the Move," where we discuss the historical and contemporary impacts of migration in the Aegean region. We continue to talk about the economic changes that the population exchange caused in the region. In the ninth episode, we will focus on how migration has developed into an industry, how this industry has grown over the years, and who has benefited from it.
This week's guest is Mert Koçak, who completed his PhD in 2023 in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University. Mert dedicated a significant part of their dissertation, titled “Migration Industries and the Transnational Governance of Queer Migration: The Bureaucratization of Sexuality and Gender in Turkey,” to examining the process through which civil society organizations became part of the migration industry.
Mert explains how a group of actors, by enabling, restricting, and controlling migration, came together to form the migration industry. To demonstrate how these actors have historically shaped migration, they highlight the role of intermediaries in the Trans-Atlantic migration from Europe to America in the 19th century. In the context of the Population Exchange, they provide detailed information about the actors who profited by facilitating the crossing of the Aegean and by seizing abandoned properties. Finally, they discuss the profit-making activities along the contemporary Aegean migration route, showing that while the actors or methods of making profits may have changed over time, the principle of profiting at the expense of migrants has remained the same.
The interview with Mert Koçak was conducted by Ozan Mirkan Balpetek, in both English and Turkish. Our friends from Community Peacemaker Teams also provided a summary and commentary in Greek.
