Abstract
ON REEVALUATION OF THE TERM STRANGER IN CASE OF REFUGEE PROBLEM
The conflicts in the Middle-eastern countries caused massive groups of population to relocate. The most observable sample of this situation is that millions of escaping people from the Syrian civil war refugeed to other countries, especially Turkey. Since it is quite new that such large populations of people became a subject for international migration, it sociologically caused the host countries to have social integration problems. In Turkey, the sociological studies conducted on the mentioned situation applied different conceptualisations. One of these conceptualisations is the stranger which is formulated by German sociologist Georg Simmel. In Simmel’s formal sociology, the stranger as a person who becomes a member of a social group later than others is a social type whose identity is defined by the group. Conceptualised in a methodological context by Simmel, the stranger is used by Simmel himself and the followers of him (especially Zygmunt Bauman) in a negative meaning for cricitism to modernity and meant to be the human groups suchs as religious and etnich minorities which have a historical bond with socities they are located in. This study claims that the stranger typology has just begun to form in the case of refugee population In this purpose, it is examined which ways the stranger concept is handled in theoretical and empirical studies and discussed applicability of the term to the refugee problem.
Keywords
Social Integration, Refugee Problem, Georg Simmel, Zygmunt Bauman, The Stranger
