Negotiating belonging in digital gaming environments: Syrian youth under temporary protection in Türkiye

This study examines how Syrian migrant youth negotiate belonging within digital gaming environments under temporary protection conditions in Türkiye. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 32 Syrian migrant youth residing in Gaziantep, the study analyzes how gaming-based interaction mediates processes of social participation, recognition, and relational belonging. The findings show that digital gaming environments function as interactional arenas in which recognition is constructed through performance, communicative alignment, and the management of identity cues visible in interaction. Participation in these spaces enables the formation of locally embedded peer ties while sustaining temporal and transnational continuities of belonging across Syria, Türkiye, and third-country contexts. At the same time, access to recognition remains unevenly distributed across intersecting social positions such as gender, disability, and experiences of bereavement within the broader structural constraints of temporary protection. By conceptualising gaming environments as micro-social arenas of peer evaluation and relational anchoring, the study extends the literature on the politics of belonging beyond institutional sites and proposes a heuristic model of digital negotiated belonging under conditions of legal uncertainty.