From Sweden with Love: Turkish Migrants in Sweden and their Social Remittances

Abstract: The aim of this thesis is first to contribute to the theorising of the so-called ‘social remittances’. This entails an attempt to put together the reasons that qualifies the flow of social goods from migrant destinations to sending communities as remittances, as well as an endeavour to contribute to definitional clarifications on what constitutes the different natures, levels and types of these remittances and remitters. Following the theoretical work, I investigate two main questions: 1) Do the Turkish social remittances from Sweden indiscriminately serve for social development goals within the sending communities? 2) Does existing categorisation of certain types of immigrants and their remittance levels within the social remittance theory hold for the Swedish-Turkish case? I propose an intense clarification of definitions to go about answering these questions. Furthermore, the empirical part of this study is designed as a case study, collecting the necessary data through discourse analysis of an anti-terror rally organised by the Swedish-Turkish Worker’s Federation in Stockholm, and 9 semi-structured interviews that served greatly in my own quest of understanding the phenomenon.