Understanding Iranian Refugee Discourse in Turkey on Twitter by Using Social Network Analysis

More than 39,000 Iranian refugees are purposefully "trapped" in Turkey, which represents an increasing trend. Iranian refugees are a specific case in migration history because the push factor is not war, but rather a "unique" reason. Most of them will later not be able to go back to Iran because the Iranian government has imposed the entry permit policy. For the first time, this research will analyse the voices of Iranian asylum seekers in Turkey by utilising the Social Network Analysis (SNA) with NodeXl and Gephi software using 29,987 Twitter data, obtained from February to April 2019. The finding is that most of the conversation starters come from among the refugees themselves (@m5ggw436vg6ln4i, @mahya2019, and @ kindnes65049573), tweeting mostly about "resettlement", "Canada", and "EU", with 4,369 tweets expressing posi-tive, and 7,360 expressing negative sentiments about the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UN-HCR). However, the process of resettlement to Canada is rendered nearly impossible because of the very low accept-ance rate (below 2%), hence the UNHCR must search for another long-term solution for the Iranian refugees who are in the refugee camp today.