Deceitful Dream Sellers: Addressing the Loop of Lies Sustaining the Labour Exploitation of International Students in Northern Cyprus

The European Union imposition in 1994 of an embargo on importations from the TRNC forced the de facto state of Northern Cyprus to reorient its economy. One direction seen as viable was expansion of the tertiary education sector. This idea circulated among intellectual spheres, which believed that a large pool of Turkish students, who had not been accepted at public universities in Turkey, would undertake studies in the TRNC. While initially this was true, in the early 2000s there was falling demand from Turkish students, leading the six existing universities to recruit students from elsewhere, particularly from countries in Africa and the Middle East.