Different Modes of Migrant Belonging in a Global City: An Analysis of Turkish Migrants in Brussels Beyond Stereotypes

Recent scholarship highlights the proliferation of heterogeneities within contemporary ethnic migrant groups and points, especially, to cities as places where this in-group diversity is ever- growing. With this perspective, this thesis investigated the sense of belonging in an ethnic group through the prism of in-group diversity. The Turkish migrant community in Brussels was chosen as the case study, and the data were collected through 53 semi-structured interviews supplemented with participant observations. The investigation demonstrated that the Brussels Turkish migrant community involves vast heterogeneities, and in line with this, it identified different segments with different characteristics within the community. This research is based on three segments within the community -the Schaerbeek sub-group, the secular sub-group, and the religious sub-group- each of which holds distinct characteristics. This thesis analyzed the sense of belonging in these three segments with a multidimensional approach, understanding migrant belonging as a phenomenon that comes into being through migrant interaction with different socio-political levels: neighbourhood, city, nation-state, transnational, supranational, and cosmopolitan. These different dimensions of belonging do not exclude each other; migrants feel they belong to all or a few simultaneously, albeit in varying degrees. The research concluded that each segment of the Turkish community developed a distinct mode of belonging, a different mixture of the dimensions mentioned above. Further, this thesis puts particular emphasis on the global city context in its investigation of belonging. Literature on migrants in global cities usually relies on the economy-oriented description of the global city, in which migrants are generally perceived as passive subjects of socio-economic polarization and exclusion. In contrast, this thesis adopted a migrant-centred approach in its analysis, which sees migrants as active agents and cocreators of global cities. It demonstrated that global cities provide a conducive environment for different segments of migrants, offering various socio-spatial spaces where each segment could live in a version of the city pertinent to its characteristics. Against this background, this research argues that the lens of in-group diversity is instrumental in revealing different modes of belonging in contemporary ethnic migrant groups living in global cities. Thus, it helps to explore migrant belonging beyond stereotypes. In this view, this study illustrated that the Schaerbeek sub-group, seen as the representative of the Turkish community and associated with the Turkish migrant stereotype, is only one segment of the community; the other two segments are almost invisible to the literature and the public and political discourse. This thesis asserts that associating migrants with certain neighbourhoods in the global city, such as ethnic enclaves, perpetuates the illusionary image that migrants in these neighbourhoods are representative of the whole ethnic group, neglecting the rest of the group in different parts of the city. This was evident in the case of the Schaerbeek sub-group, the segment living in the Schaerbeek neighbourhood of Brussels, an ethnic enclave known as the Turkish neighbourhood of the city. This thesis finally demonstrates, overall, that the lens of in-group diversity and the migrant-centred approach to global cities help researchers avoid the risk of generalizing a particular mode of belonging specific to only one segment to the whole group.