FROM PROPERTY TO CIVIL SOCIETY: THE HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION OFVAKIFS IN MODERN TURKEY (1923–2013)

Abstract

In this article, I argue that shifting development discourses have shaped the meaning and function of vakıfs (religious endowments) in Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923. I identify three periods defined by their distinctive development discourse, and show how each of these discourses made vakıfs into both an object and a site of development. In the etatist discourse of the 1930s, vakıfs were articulated as national treasures tasked with financing state-led economic development. With the shift to a mixed economy discourse in the 1960s, vakıfs were reconfigured as private philanthropic foundations expected to create a skilled labor force. The neoliberal development discourse of the 1980s transformed vakıfs into welfare organizations focused on poverty. This article shows that in all three of these periods, the relationship between state, Islam, economy, and society was articulated, legitimized, and consolidated with reference to a seemingly stagnant but in fact malleable institution inherited from the Ottoman Empire—the vakıf. I refer to this process as the “local production of development,” a conceptualization emphasizing how global discourses of development are formed and transformed at the local level.

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