Activism and Women's NGOs in Turkey

Civil Society, Feminism and Politics

Asuman Özgür Keysan

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786726315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Civil society is often seen as male, structured in a way that excludes women from public and political life. Much feminist scholarship sees civil society and feminism as incompatible a result. But scholars and activists are currently trying to update this view by looking at women's positions in civil society and women's activism. This book contributes to this new research, arguing that civil society is a contested terrain where women can negotiate and successfully challenge dominant discourses in society. The book is based on interviews with women activists from ten women's organizations in Turkey. Foregrounding the voices of women, the book answers the question "How do women's NGOs contribute to civil society in the Middle East?". At a time when civil society is being promoted and institutionalised in Turkey, particularly by the EU, this book demonstrates that women's organisations can help achieve women's emancipation, even if there are significant differences in their approaches and ideas.

1

Civil society and women’s NGOs: Feminist reactions

This book critically examines the debate on the relationship between civil society and feminism and aims to identify to what extent and in what ways voices of women activists contribute to the meaning(s) of civil society and/or produce alternative understandings to the dominant neoliberal and gendered view of civil society. In order to throw light on this debate, this book particularly focuses on the empirical case of ten women’s organizations in Turkey and discusses how women activists from these groups approach the concept and practices of civil society and whether and how they produce alternative ways of thinking to this dominant view.

This book is a response to two current political struggles over the theory and practice of civil society. The first has to do with the contemporary dominance of a neoliberal version and its contestation. Civil society has long been an ambiguous and contested term, as is evident in the existence of diverse traditions in the civil society literature – such as liberal, Marxist, Gramscian and Habermasian. However, since the global revival of the concept in the 1980s, the meaning of the concept has become more fixed. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, civil society was perceived by both scholars and policymakers as a way of overcoming a range of problems associated with authoritarianism and the crisis of the welfare state. Policymakers, scholars and NGO activists alike have interpreted the revival of civil society as ‘a return to associational life, enabling engagement with the state and fostering solidarity in the public sphere’ (Chandhoke, 2005), thereby facilitating the cultivation of ‘trust, choice and virtues of democracy’ (Young, 2000: 155). In this context, international institutions such as the European Union (EU), the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank (WB) have employed the notion of civil society as a policy tool for promoting democracy and development, including in the Middle East. The dominant approach of international organizations rests on a Western, liberal dichotomy between state and civil society, in which civil society is identified with associational life and control over the state. In this sense, civil society is construed as crucial to the functioning of liberal democracy and democratic governance an empowering force against the authoritarian state. However, civil society is also associated by international organizations with neoliberal policies intended to shrink the developmental and welfare state, bringing with it an emphasis on the delegation of key responsibilities to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including women’s NGOs, in the areas of poverty, education, health and the like, a fact that has garnered significant critique.¹

The second political struggle over civil society hinges on the gendered character of the theory and practice of civil society. Feminist thinkers and commentators locate the gendered bias of the term, particularly the liberal/neoliberal versions of civil society, in the reification of a public/private divide.² Put simply, liberals waver between two views of the public/private divide; in one view, civil society is squarely envisioned as part of a public, masculine sphere distinct from a private, feminine sphere, and in the other, it is private yet still distinguished from domestic life (Okin, 1998: 117; Squires, 2003: 132). In both views, civil society is associated with masculine traits and roles. Not only does this reveal the gendering of civil society as a concept, but it also calls attention to the historical exclusion of women from civil society and political life based on the desire to confine them to a private world. By exposing the reification of the liberal public/private dichotomy, feminist theorists highlight the interaction between civil society and both public and private spheres, and bring the family, considered as a part of the private or domestic sphere, back into political consideration (Benhabib and Cornell, 1987: 7).

The dominant neoliberal and gendered version of civil society is contested across different historical and institutional contexts in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Latin America, Southern Africa, South East Asia and the Middle East, including in Turkey. Particularly in the Middle East, where we observe many studies that criticize neoliberal civil society, there are scholars who seek to rethink civil society in the region by looking at women’s position and activism. Such scholars indicate the gendered dimensions of civil society and the state, and the increasing significance of gender politics in challenging the state in the region.³ To be sure, a number of studies have explored the history, trajectories and contemporary contexts of the women’s movement, women’s activism around state ideology and policies, NGOization, and the gendered dimensions of funding processes in the Middle East, including Turkey.⁴ Particularly in Turkey, feminist scholars and activists have examined the understandings of women’s groups and civil society organizations (CSOs) of the effects of the EU accession process on civil society organizations, especially women’s organizations. They have critically researched the impacts of the EU and other international funding on the Turkish women’s/feminist movements and women’s organizations.⁵ However, there is a limited research on NGO activists’ articulation of civil society in the Middle East, which includes work by Abdelrahman (2004) and Pratt (2005) on the engagement of NGO activists with civil society and power in Egypt, and Kuzmanovic (2012)’s study on activists in Turkey. There has been even less attention given to women activists’ articulations of civil society, with the exceptions of Doyle (2017a, 2017b), Çaha (2013) and Leyla Kuzu (2010).

This book builds upon and seeks to contribute to these critical interrogations of civil society in Turkey but takes as its starting point the question of how NGOs in general, and women’s NGOs in particular, can contribute to the field of meaning around civil society, as this has not been widely discussed in the literature. As such, this book focuses on voices of women activists from ten different women’s NGOs and their contributions to civil society in Turkey. Particularly, it seeks to identify how and in what ways voices of women activists in Turkey contribute to the meaning of civil society and/or produce alternative understandings to the dominant view of civil society, which is gendered and neoliberal in character. Foregrounding women’s voices and their experiences helps not only to engender the concept and practices of civil society but also to document the transformative potential of civil society activism for women.

Why Turkey?

The Turkish context offers a unique window of opportunity for analysing women’s voices in the promotion and institutionalization of civil society. Although Turkey cannot be regarded independently from the global revival of civil society, and particularly not from efforts to promote and institutionalize it across the Middle East, there are three reasons why the Turkish case is distinctive.

First, the Turkish modernization process has fuelled tensions between secularism and Islam that affect both civil society and women’s organizing in distinctive ways. Turkey is unique among the other Middle Eastern countries with regards to its modernization process, led by the Kemalist elites who promoted secularism and Westernization. ‘Turkey is often singled out as the only Muslim majority country with a secular Constitution and a Civil Code (adopted in 1926) that breaks with the shar’ia’ (Kandiyoti, 2011b). The aspiration to be modern through Westernization and Europeanization dates back to the Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, which intensified with the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923. Republican Kemalist elites sought to disengage with the Ottoman past, which they associated with Islamic traditions, through the top-down imposition of a secular state and secularist political culture, backed by military force (Arat, 2009; Göle, 1997; Tank, 2005: 6; Toprak, 2005). Their effort was only partially successful and a dichotomy emerged between the secular modernity of elites and urban centres, and Islamist values in rural areas and among the poor. Westernization by state-imposed reforms has predominantly been perceived as a reason for the subjugation of civil society by the Kemalist secular state in Turkey (Toprak, 1996). Tensions remain today as Islamic forces seek entry into civil society and Kemalists resist that move (Doyle, 2017a, 2017b, Ketola, 2011; Seçkinelgin, 2004; Şimşek, 2004).

The dichotomy between Western and Islamist values and the Turkish Republic’s modernizing project have had crucial implications for women’s organizing in Turkey (Kardam, 2005: 3). To begin with, Kemalism instrumentalized the women’s movement. The struggle for women’s rights in Turkey began in the Tanzimat period of the Ottoman modernization, and after the 1908 revolution ‘women emerged as activists, forming their own associations and expanding the volume of their publications’ (Kandiyoti, 1991: 43). However, in the early years of the Turkish Republic, as Al-Ali emphasizes (2003: 217), the women’s movement in Turkey was induced by ‘developmental and modernist aims’ in contrast to colonized countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Palestine; it was supported as pulling away from the Islamist roots of the Ottoman Empire and bolstering the secular ideology⁶ that could justify ‘the new state’ (Arat, 1994: 71; see also Kardam, 2005: 39–40).⁷ Since the 1980s the women’s movement has been characterized by diversification, with the rise of feminist and Kurdish oppositional voices to Kemalism, as well as a conflict between Islamic organizing and Kemalism. In Kandiyoti’s words (2011b), ‘A new generation of post-1980s feminists were no longer content to be the grateful daughters of the republic.’ Such women questioned ‘the modernist gender discourse promoted by secular state elites’, reconsidering women’s position within society and challenging the public/private divide (Kardam, 2005: 43, 45).⁸ But new divisions within the women’s movement also emerged at this time (Diner and Toktaş, 2010: 42; Coşar and Onbaşı, 2008: 325; Landig, 2011), most obviously around sexuality (sexual orientation and gender identity), the headscarf issue, the Kurdish issue and class. Kurdish and Islamist women criticized Kemalists for ‘being ethno-centric and exclusionary of other identities’ (Diner and Toktaş, 2010: 47). In such ways, then, the dynamics of modernization and the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Civil society and women’s NGOs: Feminist reactions
• 2 Civil society and NGOs: Theories, applications and feminist critique
• 3 The sociopolitical context in Turkey: Official dominant civil society discourses
• 4 Mapping civil society as a voluntaristic, autonomous and mediatory agent
• 5 Reconstructing the site of civil society: Alternative voices
• 6 Encounter with official civil society discourses: Reflection, negotiation, critique or resistance?
• 7 Women’s voices in civil society: Transformatory potential?
• Appendix: Profile of interviewees
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page