Scalar entrapment and the multiscalar geographies of refugee (im)mobility

This article examines how refugee spatiality is governed and experienced through scalar entrapment, which we define as the recursive immobilisation of refugees through intersecting global, national, and urban regimes. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Istanbul, we demonstrate how international containment agreements, national asylum laws, and local bordering practices co-produce spatial injustice. Using a mutiscalar and relational approach, the analysis reveals that refugees are immobilised both through formal governance structures and everyday bordering, stigma, and embodied fear. However, spatial agency persists through survival strategies, solidarity networks, and gendered practices. We argue that Istanbul is an illustrative site for theorising how refugee spatiality is produced through multiscalar, embodied, and politically structured processes of scalar entrapment.