Mapping Civil Society in the Middle East: The Cases of Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey

Altan‐Olcay, Özlem; İçduygu, Ahmet

doi:10.1080/13530194.2012.709699

Cited by 44 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Yet it was the same capacity that ended up reproducing repressive regimes, which democracy promotion aimed to alleviate by supporting political pluralism through civil society organizations (Burnell and Schlumberger, 2010;Durac, 2009). Furthermore, these activities linked with only a limited range of organizations, resembling Western counterparts (Hawthorne, 2004;Altan-Olcay and Icduygu, 2012). When the hopes vested in this strategy did not bring about gradual democratization (Encarnación, 2006), and ''friendly'' regimes became visibly problematic, discussions of moderate Islamic actors became pronounced.…”

Section: The Place Of Critiquementioning

confidence: 97%

Politics of critique: Understanding gender in contemporary Middle East

Altan‐Olcay

2015

Geoforum

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a b s t r a c tThis paper explores the implications of spatial production of academic knowledge on the Middle East, through the critiques of Orientalist discourses on the ''Muslim woman.'' It begins with an examination of the success of postcolonial studies and scholarship on democratization in challenging racist perceptions and politics in the West. Then it reflects on the ways in which this knowledge production travels and is reconfigured in places where power inequalities are different. This requires a consideration of the regional consequences of either an over-emphasis on differences in agencies of ''Muslim women'' or a relative silence on issues of gender inequality. The paper's suggestion is to shift the focus from representation and discourse to the structural circumstances in which ordinary men and women's agencies play out; various political mechanisms which participate in the production of acceptable cultural practices; and patterns of resistance, which may defy arguments about culturally specific definitions of agency. This is a quest for making the ''exotic'' familiar, without exoticizing the familiar.

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Section: The Place Of Critiquementioning

confidence: 97%

Politics of critique: Understanding gender in contemporary Middle East

Altan‐Olcay

2015

Geoforum

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“…State-civil society dynamics have been examined extensively in the Turkish context as well, using comparable concepts. Studies address the Turkish state's attempts to coopt civil society and blur the boundaries of state and society (Altan-Olcay & Icduygu, 2012). This process of cooptation ''tames'' civil society through what Yabanci (2019) calls either appropriation or containment.…”

Section: Ngos and The Statementioning

confidence: 99%

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

Kayali

2022

Voluntas

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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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“…Summing up the empirical material on civic engagement in different middle eastern countries in the 2000s-2010s and countryspecific features of civil society development recorded in a number of studies (Wiktorowicz, 2000;hawthorne, 2004;Cavatorta and durac, 2010;Altan-olcay and İçduygu, 2012;mühlenho, 2014), it is possible to outline several basic features of civil society in the region:…”

Section: Conceptual Understanding Of Civil Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-Western Model of Civil Society in the Middle Eastern Context: Promises and Discontents

Шлыков¹

2021

RGA

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The article analyzes the specific experience of civil society development in the Middle East, which remarkably exposes the dilemma underlying the civil society concept as a matrix of working democracy. This concept limits the understanding of the very phenomenon of civil society and peculiarities of its functioning in the region. An analysis of the Middle Eastern specifics requires a functional approach and a hybrid definition of civil society. This approach has a number of heuristic advantages over both liberal and critical theories. The article outlines the Middle Eastern model of civil society and postulates the key characteristic of illiberal civil society—it becomes conducive to the reproduction of authoritarian regimes even despite its institutional diversity. The analysis shows the ambivalence of civil society in the Middle East as a space of limited freedom of political/non-political activity and as a testing ground for the development of various tools designed to curb civic initiative. The liberal model of civil society, directly incorporated in state-building, is turned upside down in the Middle East. Civil society organizations in this region are hardly functional as an outpost for promoting liberal democratic values because they prove to serve the interests of the elite or alternative political forces much more than the interests of ordinary citizens.

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Mapping Civil Society in the Middle East: The Cases of Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey

Cited by 44 publications

References 15 publications

Politics of critique: Understanding gender in contemporary Middle East

Politics of critique: Understanding gender in contemporary Middle East

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

Non-Western Model of Civil Society in the Middle Eastern Context: Promises and Discontents

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