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

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.

Faith Actors and the Global Compact on Refugees: A Local Role, a Global Norm?

“…Finally, Brazil and South Africa participate in specific regional regimes for refugee protection: the 1984 Cartagena Declaration and the 1967 Organization of African Unity Convention concerning Specific Aspects of Refugees in Africa, respectively. Importantly, civil society partnerships play a prominent role in the implementation of refugee policies in all six case countries (Jubilut 2006;Pugh 2014;Lewis 2019;Kayali 2022;Fisseha 2018;Cameron 2021;Milner and Klassen 2021). These partnerships are key in the framework of the GCR.…”