Exploring the cultural and moral worlds of anti-Syrian violence: an ethnography of everyday hostility in an Istanbul neighbourhood

Communal violence towards immigrants has been the subject of significant research, but we still do not understand how everyday hostility becomes morally approved physical harm. This article examines narratives surrounding collective violence in an Istanbul neighbourhood in 2019 and again 2022. Drawing on collaborative ethnography and autoethnography, the study situates the incidents within broader patterns of hostility towards Syrians across Türkiye that shape mundane, local interactions, such as unfriendly jokes and rumours. Addressing scholarship on violence, morality and dehumanisation, the study highlights the ways in which material insecurity, spatial anxieties and nationalist discourses intersect to rationalise exclusion and aggression. The article is a case study of the culturally specific ways dehumanisation functions, showing how gendered and moralised narratives legitimise violence under the guise of protecting the social order. Theoretically, this article challenges a common division in the literature between everyday and exceptional violence, arguing instead for a continuum in which symbolic and episodic harms are entangled via ideology, social relationships and institutional contexts. This work also calls for more nuanced understandings of how ordinary people, through everyday practices and narratives, become agents of violence with implications for policy and scholarship aimed at preventing collective acts of aggression in refugee-hosting societies.