Reframing the Refugee Rentier State: Turkey in the European Refugee ‘Crisis’

The refugee rentier state seeks to manipulate mass population movements to obtain economic and political/strategic ‘rents’, asserting itself in a way that challenges the premises of Global South marginality, disempowerment and exclusion within the international system. This article develops the concept of the refugee rentier state, which it understands as a political economy framework for analysing how host states transform refugee populations into sources of bargaining power within asymmetric systems of global governance, while showing how this “trading” feeds into economic vulnerabilities and exclusions associated with forced labour arrangements. It shows how refugee hosting can function as a strategic asset through which states extract economic and political/strategic rents from wealthier counterparts. Drawing on Turkey’s engagement with the European Union in the European refugee “crisis”, the article examines how refugee rentier strategies operate within, rather than outside, established migration governance regimes, giving rise to economic informality and partial labour market integration. In applying the rentier state model to EU–Turkey interactions, it situates refugee rentierism within the structural logic of EU migration externalisation and the institutional weaknesses of international refugee protection, while considering how they feed into the vulnerability of displaced populations, and specifically exposure to economic exclusion and marginalisation within transit countries.