When Samir left Sudan to study in Northern Cyprus in 2023, he imagined days structured around lectures and assignment deadlines. Two years later, he measured time in hours worked instead: 16-hour days of construction in the mornings, driving an illegal taxi at night, and fitting classes in wherever he could. “I see myself as a clock”, he told us. “The moment I wake up I calculate everything… I don’t think of myself as a person, only as someone who is working.”
On paper, Samir is an international student in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). In practice, having fled war in Sudan, he is a de facto refugee whose right to stay depends on remaining enrolled and solvent. His story, and those of many others we met during our research on displacement and asylum on the island, reflects recent shifts in the global politics of higher education, borders and work.
Over the past two decades, international student numbers have more than tripled worldwide. Universities and governments increasingly rely on students from the Global South to generate revenue, plug labour shortages and fuel global competition for skilled migrants. International education has become a lucrative industry, complete with recruitment agents, pathway colleges and promises of post-study work and future residency.
These dynamics are unusually concentrated in Northern Cyprus. Branded as the land of international universities, the TRNC now hosts 22 higher education institutions in a territory of around 400,000 people. By 2022, roughly 87 per cent of students enrolled there were international. If included in UNESCO statistics, Théotime Chabre projects, the TRNC would likely top the global charts of both university density and proportion of international students.
This expansion is partly tied to the island’s unresolved political division. Although Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004, the island has remained divided since its partition in 1974 following the conflict between Turkish and Greek Cypriots. A UN-monitored buffer zone, the Green Line, separates the TRNC in the north from the Republic of Cyprus (RoC), a non-Schengen EU member state that claims sovereignty over the entire island but exercises effective control only in the south. International conventions and regulatory regimes are either suspended or partially operative in the TRNC, which is recognised only by Turkey.
Faced with diplomatic isolation, trade embargoes and dependence on Turkey’s fiscal and political support – delivered in extractive forms – the TRNC has turned to higher education, alongside tourism and casinos, to sustain its economy. Universities bring in foreign currency through tuition, housing and student spending, now accounting for roughly one-third of GDP.
Over the past decade, this boom has taken on a new dimension, layering historical and contemporary patterns of displacement into what we conceptualise elsewhere as ‘nested borders’. As conflicts across the Middle East and Africa reshaped mobility amid tightening asylum regimes in Europe, Turkey and beyond, Northern Cyprus has emerged as an aberrant route for people like Samir seeking safety and opportunity on the edges of Europe. Although not formally an international border, the Green Line has increasingly come to function as a de facto external EU frontier, where asylum responsibilities are unevenly distributed and frequently deferred. North of the line, the Common European Asylum system is suspended, and the UN refugee agency operates through indirect and limited arrangements; south of it, access to rights and protection is increasingly securitised.
It is these misalignments among the jurisdictions of TRNC, RoC, the EU and the UN that produce what we call ‘nested borders’: the gaps and overlaps between territorial, institutional and legal regimes that both constrain and enable movement. As migrants navigate these gaps – by crossing boundaries, claiming rights or circumventing restrictive legal rules – they strain and rework the relationships among governing authorities, legal systems and humanitarian actors.
The situation of students like Samir in the TRNC reveals higher education as a key institutional domain through which nested borders are enacted in Cyprus. Although formally categorised as ‘international students’ – a label that presumes choice, resources and privilege – many come from Yemen, Sudan, Syria, Congo, Palestine and other conflict-affected regions. Their trajectories, shaped by displacement and limited options, parallel those of the asylum seekers and refugees we interviewed in the Republic of Cyprus, who travelled along comparable routes towards and across the island. For many, higher education is less an end in itself than a means of securing safety, stability and a possible future in Europe.
In the absence of a functioning asylum system and enabled by government policies promoting the private expansion of higher education through land leases and tax exemptions, universities and recruitment agencies in the TRNC tap into this search for legal and spatial access. They offer flexible admission criteria, English-taught programmes and discounted – yet fully prepaid – tuition packages marketed as scholarships to students coming from these regions. One university, for instance, admits Sudanese students exclusively through a standing agreement with a recruitment agency, which channels arrivals from areas of intensified displacement, including Syria and Palestine.
Through these agreements and associated payment schemes, universities effectively sell acceptance letters as entry documents, structuring and monetising mobility within the gaps of nested borders. Because the TRNC lacks international recognition, all students enter via Turkey, where proof of enrolment enables transit. Samir explained that he “came without a visa, with only university acceptance and tuition payment”, while another student from Yemen noted that “the acceptance letter was [his] guarantee… Students, for their part, use these pathways strategically, often treating higher education as one of the few viable routes through an otherwise blocked migratory landscape.
Higher education institutions not only facilitate access but also embed displaced students in the regulatory frameworks that govern their presence in this fragmented jurisdiction. Maintaining enrolment and tuition payments is a condition of legal residence; those falling behind risk losing status and being deported to the very places they fled. Unlike contexts where international students are positioned as future high-skilled labour migrants with work rights, TRNC student visas do not automatically allow employment. Obtaining a work permit requires employer sponsorship, a hurdle none of our interlocutors managed to overcome.
In this setting, studentship itself takes on the qualities of ‘confined labour’ , work regulated by tight temporal, spatial and legal restrictions, which generates value through managed dependency. Navigating volatile exchange rates, negotiating with landlords who demand months of rent upfront, and managing opaque university bureaucracies constitute a form of reproductive labour that sustains both the higher education economy and the de facto state.
To bridge the gap between required expenditure and permitted income, students rely on informal jobs, driving ‘pirate taxis’, doing construction, working in call centres, delivering food, running home-based salons or acting as commission-based sub-agents for recruitment offices. Some help build the very cities from which they are excluded as workers; others recruit new students into the same system that exploits them. Still others attempt crossings to the south to apply for asylum, return when waiting for status there becomes unsustainable, or move back and forth as circumstances shift.
In this way, higher education in the TRNC shapes not just study-related migration but survival in displacement. Viewed as ‘unlawful’ by some for operating outside the RoC law, TRNC universities often serve as the very gateway for students who could not otherwise enter the island, reconfiguring the edges of Europe. Beyond providing access and education, they embed displaced students within contemporary border and labour regimes, by making presence conditional on continuous payment and enrolment. Sustained through the gaps and overlaps of nested borders, higher education turns survival into a precarious source of profit, leaving students like Samir to live, quite literally, by the clock.
Aicha Lariani is a graduate student in the Public Issues Anthropology programme at the University of Waterloo. Her research, conducted as part of the SSHRC-funded project Border Frictions (Insight Grant 435-2021-0342, PI: Suzan Ilcan), examines student migration and everyday experiences of displacement in Northern Cyprus.
Seçil Dağtaş is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Waterloo and a faculty member at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. She is Co-Investigator on the SSHRC-funded Border Frictions project and researches religious difference, gender and the experiences of minority and displaced communities in Turkey and Cyprus.
Image credit: Hongbin via Unsplash