Negotiating State-Civil Society Relations in Turkey: The Case of Refugee-Supporting Organizations

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Abstract

How do nonstate organizations carry out their programs in political contexts hostile to civil society activity? This paper examines the case of refugee-supporting organizations in Turkey, which hosts over 3.6 million Syrians under a temporary protection regime. While the Turkish state has taken a central role in refugee reception, nonstate organizations have played a sizeable role in refugee support. Analyzing interviews with key personnel across 23 organizations in Istanbul, the paper finds that organizational capacity and organizational identity together explain variations in CSO-state relations. While high-capacity organizations that adopt a variety of “rights-based” and “needs-based” identities will cooperate with state institutions, lower-capacity organizations use comparable signifiers to justify selective engagement or avoidance of state institutions. The paper argues that analyzing how organizations negotiate their identities can help explain variations in CSO-state relations in restrictive contexts without relying on a priori assumptions about CSO alignment with or opposition to the state.

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APA

Kayali, N. (2023). Negotiating State-Civil Society Relations in Turkey: The Case of Refugee-Supporting Organizations. Voluntas, 34(6), 1209–1220. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-022-00545-9

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