The mutual constitution of illiberal civil society and neoauthoritarianism: Evidence from Turkey

Abstract

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Recent scholarship on state–civil society dynamics in neoauthoritarian contexts demonstrates that the space for civil society is rapidly shrinking worldwide. Faced with legal, administrative, and extralegal measures that restrict operations and resources, civil society actors are forced to choose between marginalization or co-optation. This article examines the ruling party–Islamic civil society symbiosis in Turkey and identifies mutual constitution as an alternative model of the state–civil society relationship in hybrid regimes. Defined as utilitarian reciprocity between the ruling authority and civil society actors where both parties expand and consolidate their respective domains, the mutually constitutive relationship between the AKP government and Islamic civil society actors has facilitated the consolidation of neoauthoritarianism. Drawing attention to the recent rise of conservative civil society actors worldwide, the article urges the civil society and neoauthoritarianism research program to shift its focus to non-state actors that endorse non-democratic socio-political agendas and function as co-constitutors of illiberal regimes.

Keywords

Civil society faith-based organizations hybrid regimes neoauthoritarianism political Islam Turkey

We consider civil society not a threat but the corner stone of national unity and solidarity. Civil society is not an opposition but the right hand of the state. No matter how powerful, the state cannot achieve its goals without the support and assistance of civil society.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Our friends are in power now.

NGO vice-chairman

A growing number of researchers, development practitioners, and human rights institutes have been drawing attention to the significantly reduced space for civil society actors in recent years. One of the early surveys on the alarming trend, conducted in 2016 by CIVICUS and Civil Society Europe (CIVICUS, 2016), has indicated that governments in more than 100 countries, including in Europe, have introduced restrictive legislation curtailing the operations of civil society actors. Following the publication of the survey, a flurry of reports and think-pieces from development agencies, human rights watch groups, research institutes, and advocacy organizations have confirmed that the authoritarian pushback against democratic principles is global in scope (EFC, 2016; EU, 2017). The space for civil society, the reports and analyses have concluded, is shrinking, or indeed, closing (CSIS, 2017).

A parallel strand in civil society scholarship has also been calling attention to the global trend. Focusing on state–civil society relationships in hybrid regimes and identifying emerging patterns, this timely research program has established that neoauthoritarian states do not quash civil society; they use indirect means to manipulate and colonize it instead (Gero and Kopper, 2013; Greskovits, 2015; Petrone, 2011). Several single-case and comparative analyses have demonstrated that civil society actors, who are confronted with incessant legal, administrative, and extralegal interventions that restrict the civic space, are left with two options: marginalization or co-optation (e.g., Hsu et al., 2017; Yang and Alpermann, 2014). Civil society actors that do not modify their politics and practices are marginalized and criminalized. Those that promote democracy, human rights, and social justice bear the brunt in these contexts (Fu, 2017). Governments utilize draconian counterterrorism and national security laws to intimidate and silence rights-oriented civil society actors that advocate pluralist norms. Alternatively, some civil society actors opt for operating within the space shaped and regulated by the state, in the hopes of changing the regime from the inside. Nevertheless, more often than not, they become co-opted (Gerschewski, 2013), increase government effectiveness, lend a veneer of pluralism to the authoritarian regime, and foster its resilience (Jing, 2015; Lorch and Bunk, 2017).

This article maintains that the marginalization versus co-optation taxonomy overlooks a significant segment of civil society in the current era of democratic regression: non-state actors who share the ideological commitments of the ruling authority. In other words, civil society actors that are neither marginalized nor co-opted by the regime, but are willing participants and shareholders of the ruling authority’s socio-political agenda. Despite the current scholarship’s overwhelming focus on liberal non-state actors promoting progressive norms, conservative civic actors have been increasingly gaining traction and reorienting policy agendas worldwide (Youngs, 2018). These actors range from far-right groups that make the headlines for their exclusionary and ethno-religious agendas (Shapovalova, 2018) to conservative think-tanks quietly but methodically influencing policy (Fowler, 2018). Often linked to conservative political parties, they mobilize public opinion in favor of non-democratic political leaders. Correspondingly, the ruling governments expand their like-minded non-state actors’ visibility, impact, and maneuvering space in civil society. This reciprocity between non-democratic political and civic actors exacerbates democratic decline, facilitates policy implementation, and bolsters regime power.

This research analyzes one such partnership – the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government and Islamic civil society alliance – in Turkey and identifies an alternative model of state–civil society relationship in hybrid regimes: mutual constitution, defined as the relationship of utilitarian reciprocity between the ruling authority and civil society actors where both parties expand and consolidate their respective domains.

The political cadres of the AKP and its symbiotic civil society have organic ties and share an ideology as they both hail from the Milli Gorus (National Outlook) tradition, the most influential political Islamist movement in Turkey. Founded by right-wing nationalists in the early 1970s, the movement has produced several Islamist political parties and played a crucial role in cultivating a collective Islamist identity at the grassroots level (Eligur, 2010). For decades, the movement has pursued a bottom-up strategy of gradual Islamization of everyday life by fortifying networks of social solidarity (Yavuz, 2003). It primarily targeted the youth and impoverished migrant workers in urban areas, offering a social safety net through charities, foundations, and associations (Gumuscu, 2010). By the 1990s, Islamist movements had become the leading providers of social services in low-income urban communities (Tugal, 2009).

AKP’s rise to power in 2002 was a game-changer for political Islamist non-state actors’ public visibility, political power, and relationship with the state. During the party’s first term, Turkey witnessed a conservative NGO boom partly due to the legal reforms of the EU accession process (Zihnioğlu, 2013). In this period, previously informal Islamist networks and charities re-established themselves as formal nongovernmental organizations and claimed civil society status. During the party’s second term in office (2007–2011), the now formal Islamic civil society organizations started to gain greater access to state resources in the form of public funds, grants, sponsorships, and subsidies. The AKP government utilized its power in local administrations effectively and extended organizational and institutional support to local charities and NGOs primarily through municipal resources (Morvaridi, 2013). A series of changes to the legal framework allowed the more professionalized and high-profile Islamic organizations to obtain a highly coveted public benefit designation that grants tax exemptions, legal privileges, and opportunities to collaborate with state bodies, particularly in welfare management and social policymaking. In the process, they have become appendages to the state machinery, improved government capacity, mobilized voters, and reinforced the party’s hegemonic consolidation of power.

In what follows, the article overviews the current civil society and neoauthoritarianism scholarship and examines the AKP government’s repertoire of repressive strategies towards the associational sphere. After presenting the data and methodology, the article analyzes the role played by Islamic civil society in AKP’s Turkey. The research findings suggest that the government’s symbiotic civil society actors have been particularly effective in social welfare management, socio-cultural policy implementation, political agenda-setting, and voter mobilization. Promoting a civil society discourse that emphasizes a conservative communitarian value system, Islamic non-state actors legitimize their articulation into the state and assist the ruling government in delegitimizing rights-oriented advocacy actors’ claims. The concluding discussion relates the article’s findings to the growing civil society and neoauthoritarianism scholarship and calls for a research direction that focuses on civil society actors that promote illiberal norms and collaborate with non-democratic regimes.

Civil society and neoauthoritarianism: Marginalization, co-optation, mutual constitution

The genealogy of the term civil society is essentially a study in modern state theory. Since its first appearance in political theory, the line that demarcates civil society from the state has always reflected contextually specific state–market–society configurations. At a time when non-democratic regimes are on the rise across the globe, the contours of the state–civil society relationship are being redefined once again. In contrast to the previous authoritarian systems that sought to smother all forms of civic and political life, modern illiberal regimes are hybrid systems that combine authoritarian and liberal practices (Gilbert and Mohseni, 2011; Krastev, 2011; Levitsky and Way, 2011). Neoauthoritarian regimes employ sophisticated techniques of repression that create an illusion of pluralism: they do not eliminate political opposition altogether but open a controlled space by colonizing the media and civil society. As Robertson (2009) argues, the closed, highly repressive regimes that completely subjugate the public sphere through sheer coercion, such as Kim Jong II’s North Korea, come across as relics of twentieth-century totalitarian models. On the contrary, non-democratic regimes that have the best chance for survival today are those that manage to coexist with and discipline their civil societies (Cavatorta, 2012; Ekiert and Kubik, 2014).

Neoauthoritarian regimes choose to strategically cultivate associational activity rather than catalyzing the state apparatus to obtain coerced compliance (Gero and Kopper, 2013) because they benefit significantly from a manipulated and colonized associational sphere. A dependent civil society that is incorporated into the state machinery improves state capacity and government effectiveness (Richter and Hatch, 2013; Tarasenko, 2018). The regime gets to depoliticize social discontent at home (Froissart, 2014; Geoffray, 2014; Giersdorf and Croissant, 2011), claim legitimacy in the international arena, and enhance its resilience (Teets, 2013). In that respect, civil society activity in these hybrid systems does not promote democratization but lends a veneer of democracy and associational freedom to a sophisticated system of authoritarian governmentality (Wischermann et al., 2018).

Neoauthoritarian states’ methods of colonization range from direct securitization of the associational sphere to indirect incentive systems that keep a tight rein on civil society. States typically discipline non-state actors through corporatist arrangements (Bellin, 2004; Howell, 2012) as well as discretionary and arbitrary enforcement of restrictive laws and regulations (Guo and Zhang, 2014; Tysiachniouk et al., 2018). Oppositional actors face debilitating bureaucratic obstacles and are often denied formal legal status (Daucé, 2014). In contexts that lack an established philanthropic tradition and non-state resources for civil society development, neoauthoritarian states seize civil society space by controlling access to state resources, private donations, corporate giving, and foreign funding (Carothers, 2006; Delcour and Wolczuk, 2015; Hsu, 2010; Ziegler, 2016). Overall, through its legal apparatus, the state breeds a divided and tiered associational sphere ripe for patronage and clientelism (Jamal, 2009; Spires, 2011).

What is the state–civil society relationship under such regimes? How do civil society actors respond to illiberal state practices? The findings of the new authoritarianism research program fall into two categories: marginalization versus co-optation. On the one hand, civil society actors who resist government encroachment continue to operate in unsanctioned domains and are consequently vilified and marginalized (Bogdanova et al., 2018; Flikke, 2018). On the other hand, actors that resort to making concessions on their operations and discourses to maintain their presence in the public sphere ultimately become co-opted by the regime (Krasnopolskaya et al., 2015; Tam and Hasmath, 2015). Table 1 presents an overview of these relationships.

Table 1.

State–civil society relationship in hybrid regimes.

	Marginalization	Co-optation	Mutual constitution
CS activity area	Claims-making	Claims-making Service providing	Claims-making Service providing
CS actor strategy	Refuse to modify practices Continue to operate in unsanctioned domains	Operate within the reduced space Seek to impact regime change from the inside	Partner with ruling governments Articulate into the state machinery
Outcome	Securitization Marginalization Criminalization	Regime legitimation Government capacity improvement	Government capacity improvement Agenda-setting Policy implementation Voter mobilization Regime legitimation

Largely missing from these accounts is the recognition that actors that promote non-liberal norms in support of non-democratic governments are part and parcel of the civil society sphere. The argument developed in this article maintains that the reason why the growing research program arrives at these two outcomes is its predominant focus on civic-minded and progressive claims-making actors. Whereas, as it has been becoming unmistakably evident worldwide, civil society includes non-liberal actors that promote isolationist, essentialist, and fundamentalist values as well as liberal actors that espouse pluralism, transparency, and dialogue.

Indeed, civil society’s democratizing capacity, political function, and autonomy have been up for debate for quite a while (see Berman, 1997; Carothers, 2002; Kumar, 1993). By the early 2000s, the initial conceptualization of civil society as a normative ideal had already given way to more nuanced analyses revealing that civil society does not necessarily facilitate democratization, nor is it an antidote against authoritarianism (Bermeo and Nord, 2000; Edwards and Hulme, 1996; Encarnacion, 2006; Mendelson and Glenn, 2002). As such, the rights-based advocacy-oriented lens of the current neoauthoritarianism and civil society research program loses sight of civil society segments that endorse ruling authorities’ non-democratic socio-political agendas.

The alternative dynamic presented in this study is a case in point: The non-state actors in this analysis are neither government-organized (GONGOs) nor co-opted NGOs browbeaten into cooperation with the state. They are constituent elements of a social movement tradition that has produced the ruling party. The party, once in power, followed a two-pronged approach in engaging with the associational sphere: it gradually constricted the maneuvering space of claims-making, rights-based advocacy groups while expanding its associational counterpart’s economic and political opportunity spaces. The government’s full support allowed the symbiotic civil society actors to extend their reach, crowd out the civil society sphere, and fortify the party’s grassroots networks. In sum, the mutually constitutive relationship between the party and the Islamic civil society has reinforced the hegemonic consolidation of the regime.

Turkish civil society under AKP rule: Securitization, rule by law, and clientelist control

Much like all modern hybrid regimes, the AKP government has employed a mix of direct and indirect means of control to redesign the political, legal, and economic environment within which civil society actors operate. Primarily, it has (i) securitized the associational sphere and criminalized the rights-oriented advocacy actors, (ii) instituted a restrictive legal infrastructure that is open to discretionary enforcement, and (iii) reinforced clientelist networks through resource control and allocation.

The most transparent display of AKP’s preferred state–civil society engagement model is its unmitigated interventions into the advocacy sphere. Despite paying lip service to the virtues of civil society, the government has demonstrated favoritism and selective support for civil society since its first term in office. Rights-based and advocacy groups, including Kurdish, Alevi, LGBTQ, feminist, human rights, and environmental organizations, have had a precarious relationship with public authorities. Throughout the party’s tenure, an increasingly stifling climate for oppositional voices in civil society has tracked the regime’s authoritarian drift. The two critical junctures, the 2013 Gezi Park protests and the 2016 coup attempt, elicited harsh responses from the state on all political opposition. Counterterrorism and national security measures have been used to crack down on journalists, academics, lawyers, as well as civil society activists, and scores of NGOs have been shut down by executive decrees. In this highly punitive and securitized climate, dissenting actors in the civic space have been labeled as radical agents of provocation. In the process, the marginalization of advocacy actors in civil society expanded the space accorded to loyalist actors organically linked to the party.

A second tactic in the government’s repertoire of repression is the instrumentalization of law. The government has established a draconian legal system that regulates civil society organizations’ internal management, governance, membership, operations, funding activities, donations, and partnerships. A series of revisions to the Civil Code (TBMM, 2001) and the Law of Associations (TBMM, 2004) has made the regulatory framework highly complex and restrictive compared to international standards. The legal framework is problematic on several grounds: it lacks procedural clarity, contains subjective moral clauses, and enhances administrative oversight.¹ Furthermore, the lack of transparency and horizontal accountability mechanisms in administrative processes aggravate public authorities’ abuse of regulatory discretion. Rights-oriented organizations are often bogged down in endless red tape, frequent audits, fiscal penalties, police raids, and long-term custodies. Taken together, critical actors in civil society are excluded, delegitimized, and persecuted through rule by law.

The third means of discipline and reorganization is controlling material funds and resources available to non-state actors. Once again, the discretionary power extended to public authorities in aid collection and fundraising approval creates a stratified associational sphere (TBMM, 1983). Local administrative bodies, such as district governorates and prefectures, are authorized to approve or reject applications on criteria including whether the rationale for the fundraising activity is justified, the NGO staff is competent, or the proposed activity has the potential to reach the stated goals. Fundraising drives and donation calls by rights-oriented organizations are typically blocked under bureaucratic pretexts and organizations are sanctioned for failing to comply with regulations.

Resource dependency as a technique of repression and clientelist network building is further reinforced by a selective incentive system that regulates public–private partnerships and facilitates the incorporation of non-state actors into the state machinery. The most coveted and consequential incentive is the ‘public benefit status’ designation that grants tax exemptions and public–private partnership permits to select service-oriented organizations (TBMM, 2004). Concomitant revisions to the income tax laws (TBMM, 1960) as well as the laws that regulate the public procurement practices of local administrative units (TBMM, 2005) have paved the way for collaborations between the party, business, and civil society by enhancing local authorities’ discretionary power in approving public contracts with little accountability and by offering tax exemptions to donors.² In this system of vertical reciprocity, organizations with party ties secure access to newly available sources of funding and crowd out the associational domain.

The combination of securitization of advocacy actors and a restrictive legal infrastructure promotes an associational sphere that serves the government’s socio-political interests. Furthermore, lack of procedural transparency and discretionary authority over civil society’s operations foster clientelism and partisanship in state–civil society relationships. As a result, the civil society actors that thrive under these circumstances are the Islamic welfare-oriented organizations that cooperate with the state in social service delivery and act as appendages to the state.

Data and methodology

The analysis draws on a combination of ethnographic methods, interviews, document analysis, and textual data collected longitudinally on the Islamic civil society sphere between 2009 and 2017. The charities and NGOs examined in this study were selected from the membership database of the Foundation of Volunteer Organizations of Turkey (Türkiye Gönüllü Teşekküller Vakfı – TGTV), an umbrella organization representing the nationalist, conservative, right-wing organizations, foundations, and labor unions in Turkey. Overall, I conducted a total of 43 semi-structured interviews (N = 43) with the executives (n = 12), trustees (n = 7), project coordinators (n = 11), and active members (n = 13) of 33 organizations. The interview themes included the organizations’ history, mission, projects, and formal and informal engagements with public authorities and AKP’s local chapters. The conversations often included references to Islamic values, moral principles, philanthropic tradition, and reflections on socio-political issues in the larger ‘Islamic world.’ I have maintained my contacts and returned to the field regularly to do follow-up interviews and observe the organizations’ fundraisers, member recruitment events, and committee meetings. Throughout, I have attended numerous executive committee meetings, staff meetings, symposia, workshops, and conferences held by individual organizations and NGO coalitions.

The long duration of the research process has allowed me to observe the careers of some of the individual actors in the Islamic civil society sphere alongside the trajectories of NGOs themselves. Over the years, all 33 organizations have built working relationships with the AKP-run local public administration units, including working with the local municipality to deliver aid, receiving funds and subsidies, and using municipal resources, such as auditoriums, transportation services, print shops, and catering services, for organized events. Two of them have gained public benefit status and thus started to enjoy legal and fiscal privileges. Eighteen organizations have had at least one executive member who has gone on to take a position in the municipality administration, AKP’s local chapter committees, or its metropolitan office.

The interview data were analyzed by employing the tools of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The analytical lens of critical discourse studies brings into focus the discursive reproduction of power, dominance, and inequality in the social and political context (Van Dijk, 2008). The CDA approach explores the seldom transparent relationships between discursive practices and social, cultural, and political structures. After all, it is the very opacity of these relationships that perpetuate power and hegemony (Fairclough, 1995; Wodak and Meyer, 2001). After sorting and coding the interview data in line with the state–civil society theoretical orientation, I built thematic categories based on the interviewees’ framing of civil society.³ The CDA method helped explain the ways in which Islamic NGOs reframe and reconstruct civil society’s core mission, social function, and political value in ways that underpin AKP’s state–civil society perspective.

Analysis

Civil society reconstructed: Servant of the nation, appendage of the state

I was born in a small town in the central Black Sea Region, graduated from the local imam-hatip school [religious vocational school], and moved to Istanbul in [the] late 1990s to earn my law degree. During College, I lived in a brotherhood dormitory and that’s where I built my long-lasting networks. After I returned home to practice law, I started to actively engage with the Islamic civil society organizations that distributed welfare to the poor, gave scholarships to students, offered Qur’an classes, and so on. I volunteered in several organizations, took executive positions. We built a civil society platform that consists of 53 organizations, all conservative. We canvassed coffee houses and small businesses with the AKP district representatives before the 2010 referendum and 2014 local elections. I ran for the party’s provincial chairman (ilçe başkanlığı) position in 2015. It was not to be then (kısmet olmadı) but I am currently an active member of the party so we will see what the future brings . . .

An NGO board member’s (Interviewee 9) career trajectory quoted at length above is typical of most civil society actors interviewed in this project and illustrates the extent of intertwinement between the ruling party and Islamic civil society. In the last two decades, Islamic non-state actors have actively partnered with the government in (i) managing the welfare consequences of neoliberal market policies, (ii) co-implementing a conservative-communitarian socio-cultural program, and (iii) political agenda-setting and voter mobilization.

Since coming to power in 2002, AKP has steadfastly followed a program of austerity and privatization as part of its economic neoliberalization agenda. However, in divergence from neoliberal orthodoxy, which advocates decreasing social expenditure through welfare state retrenchment, AKP instituted a social assistance system to manage the consequences of market rule and guarantee a basic level of social security to the broader public. This complex social protection system includes an extensive cash transfer and in-kind assistance scheme to the poor, widows, new mothers, orphans, the elderly, the disabled, and families of young men serving in the military.

Islamic charities and NGOs have articulated seamlessly into the government’s welfare management system. Thanks to their decades-long grassroots socio-political mobilization networks, they have become vital nodes in mediating resource allocation and service delivery at the district level. All organizations in this study, regardless of their stated activity areas, run charitable giving programs, collect donations for scholarships and in-kind aid for the poor in their local communities. Alongside cash donations, organizations distribute foodstuffs, clothing, heating fuel, cleaning supplies, school supplies, mobility equipment, and building materials. Smaller charities and service-oriented NGOs often receive donations from business people who have working relationships with AKP-run local governments. For instance, one of the largest donors of a local charity in northwestern Turkey runs a catering business that supplies meals to local student dormitories run by Islamic brotherhoods and provides catering services to the local municipality’s public events. Larger organizations undertake intermediary positions between local governments and aid recipients. Metropolitan municipalities’ Social Affairs Departments enlist local chapters of established social welfare organizations in carrying out home visits and mediating resource allocation. Volunteers visit local low-income communities, identify the ‘deserving poor,’ navigate the bureaucratic process, and file assistance applications on their behalf.

Secondly, Islamic charities and non-governmental organizations facilitate AKP’s socio-cultural agenda built upon Islamic solidarity, tradition, family values, and gender complementarity (Atalay, 2019). The most prominent manifestation of the government’s conservative communitarian ideology is its approach to social welfare management. As part of its neoliberalization program, the government has minimized state-provided institutional care and tasked family-based support networks with providing social care to children, the disabled, and the elderly (Acar and Altunok, 2013). As a rule, transferring the state’s responsibility in social care onto the family unit entails a gendered division of labor in the household and calls for women’s unpaid care work (Coşar and Yeğenoğlu, 2011).

Islamic charities and NGOs reproduce the government’s conservative-communitarian ideology by reinforcing a biologically deterministic gender regime and a patriarchal value system that considers the traditional family unit the moral backbone of a pious society. Both TGTV and its members periodically organize panels, conferences, and seminars on the sanctity of the family unit in collaboration with various state bodies, including local governorates, the Ministry of Family, Labor, and Social Services, the Directorate General for Status of Women, and the Directorate General for Family and Community Services. These large-scale events often focus on the traditional family unit’s challenges, such as the increasing divorce rate, rising marriage age, and neo-local residence patterns. Community organizations run projects that aim to prepare young women of marriage age to care for their families and households. A popular project is the four-week-long ‘motherhood certificate program,’ where young women attend lectures on becoming the moral compass of the family unit and raising pious children alongside infant care, home economy, cooking, and basic household tasks. The organizations’ religious familist position, which places the family unit over the needs and interests of its individual members and equates women’s role with her caregiving role in the family, is best exemplified in their united support for AKP’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, the international treaty targeting violence against women and domestic violence. Echoing AKP leadership’s rationalizing discourse, all but one organization opposed the treaty’s explicit emphasis on women’s rights, arguing that gender-based rights claims pose a threat to the wellbeing of the family unit.

A crucial third line of assistance is political agenda-setting and voter mobilization. Islamic organizations examined in this research routinely endorse AKP and its policy positions at critical junctures by drumming up political support for the party and mobilizing voters. The organizations’ support for AKP’s continued rule in government has reached its culmination at the 2017 referendum, which replaced the parliamentary system of government with an executive presidency model, granting Erdogan complete control of the state and all executive branch institutions. The faint lines of demarcation that nominally separated the party and its symbiotic civil society entirely disappeared as the organizations assiduously mobilized votes for Erdogan’s ‘Yes’ campaign in their electoral districts. All 33 organizations held public events and press conferences to declare their support for the campaign. NGOs’ youth and women’s branches worked aggressively to recruit and train volunteers in the grassroots. Organizations canvassed door-to-door in teahouses, hospitals, shopping malls, and adult learning schools with local AKP representatives.

Islamic organizations step up their public support for the party at times of political crisis. TGTV and its member organizations have unfailingly closed ranks in a display of unity for the government’s most controversial turns in domestic and foreign policy, such as cross-border military operations, high-profile bureaucratic appointments, and significant institutional revisions. For instance, between 2015 and 2020, eight community organizations that offer after-school classes on arts and crafts, sports, Qur’an education, and Islamic morality for school-age children held joint press conferences and declared their support for all six cross-border operations in northern Syria and Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region by the Turkish military.⁴

In all, the Islamic charities and non-governmental organizations have interlaced with the state and party machinery in ways that raise questions about their autonomy and self-determination as civil society actors. As the personal history of the participant quoted above, the intertwined relationships between the party’s district branches and civil society organizations obfuscate the social assistance mechanisms and insinuate to the beneficiaries that the source of the much-needed aid is the ruling government. Often, the familial ties between party leaders and NGO representatives remove any semblance of the party–civil society demarcation. For instance, the older brother of one research participant (Interviewee 34), the director of a charity organization, ran in the 2015 local elections and became the mayor of a district municipality. The prospective candidate’s posters and banners adorned the charity’s local distribution centers from wall to wall throughout the campaign (field notes on organization #11, May 2015). The beneficiaries who visited the donation center in their neighborhoods could not help but notice the party and welfare organization’s unsubtle connection.

For successors of a social movement that has historically sought forms of mobilization outside the state and military establishment’s domain of influence, contemporary reticulation with the state is an ideological contradiction. How do AKP’s symbiotic civil society actors legitimize their enmeshment with the state? What are the discursive practices through which Islamic actors ‘defend’ entering into labyrinthine alliances with the state and loyalist business sectors? As discussed in what follows, Islamic actors justify this symbiosis by promoting a government-endorsed ideational reconstruction of civil society which favors service delivery and delegitimates rights-based advocacy.

Concerted strategies of discursive legitimation and delegitimation

A critical analysis of the Islamic actors’ self-repositioning in the Turkish associational field reveals a set of discursive strategies that decouples civic engagement from autonomous politics and legitimates state–civil society bidirectionality. Islamic NGOs reconstruct the civil society framework by reframing its core mission, social function, and political value. This reconstructed framework substantiates the actors’ self-positioning as the bona fide civil society of the Turkish socio-political terrain and their articulation into the state.

Islamic organizations interviewed in this study define civil society’s core mission predominantly within the parameters of charitable giving, community-oriented voluntarism, and social solidarity. The organizations rationalize circumscribing the task of civil society actors by charitable works by harking back to historical forms of philanthropy in Islam. Contemporary organizations and charities that define themselves as Islamic actors routinely invoke and claim ownership of the Ottoman vakif tradition.⁵ Organizations’ members and spokespeople argue that today’s service-oriented civil society work is ‘essentially the contemporary version of our centuries-long vakif culture’ (Interviewee 33, NGO spokesperson) where ‘serving the community, nation, and by extension, the Umma, is the primary purpose of any associational endeavor’ (Interviewee 21, NGO director). Much like the vakifs in Ottoman history, the spokespeople argue, ‘we have a responsibility to lend a hand and build the nation from the ground up (elimizi tasin altina sokup sifirdan insa etmekle sorumluyuz)’ (Interviewee 40, NGO director).

The charitable giving mission, reframed as the continuation of the vakif tradition, lends itself well to the communitarian interpretation of civil society where the primary social function of associational life is fostering social capital, communal responsibility, social solidarity, and shared norms (Putnam, 2000). All 33 organizations interviewed in this study organize regular meetings for their members and the community to socialize, build relationships, and gather support for organizations’ ongoing projects. NGO members, their guests, and members of the local community routinely congregate in NGO offices, dervish lodges, mosques, masjids, and homes for reading and discussion circles. The meetings typically have a religious theme. With the help of a facilitator or guest speaker, attendees read and interpret religious texts, e.g., verses from the Qur’an, classic collections of hadith, or anecdotes from the Prophet’s life. A discussion that relates the religious message in the texts to modern life and current events follows the reading sessions. Meetings often conclude with donation calls for scholarships and poverty relief projects.

The political value of civil society, then, according to NGO leaders and spokespeople, lies in its capacity to channel the generated social capital into a political bloc. Particularly the older members of the organization, who underwent their political socialization in the post-coup period of the 1980s, speak emphatically about the politically transformative potential of such seemingly apolitical informal engagements. For decades, charitable works allowed the Islamist movement an outlet to build social capital, enlarge its grassroots reach, recruit new members, and transfer a political ideal to younger generations. Many older NGO leaders and representatives date their political socialization, for instance, back to the humanitarian aid mobilization for the Muslim communities during the Bosnian conflict of the early 1990s. Describing their activism as being ‘in the frontlines of global Islamist awakening’ to younger members in a group conversation, one NGO co-founder (Interviewee 29) recounts how the informal mobilization for the Bosnian cause evolved into a formal organizational model:

We did not have the NGO plaque on the wall, maybe. But there was a collective effort: informal meetings, conversations, collecting donations, mulling over a better world for Muslims everywhere. Some people from those days went into politics, others became successful in business life, I stayed in the grassroots and helped establish this organization. At the end of the day, we are all essentially working towards the same goals.

The intricate networks and close engagement between the Islamist political party, market actors, and non-state actors challenge the predominant view of civil society as an autonomous domain. To the Islamic NGO representatives, however, the consanguinity between the party, market, and civil society is precisely what validates and motivates the mutually constitutive dynamic. Summarized pithily by one NGO executive (Interviewee 8, NGO vice-chairman), ‘our friends are in power now.’

Thus, Islamic actors refer to the shared history of mobilization for a conservative communitarian socio-political vision to explain their contemporary status in civil society space. Frequently referring to the state-sponsored service work, Islamic actors suggest a distinction between themselves, i.e., constructive civil society, and advocacy actors, i.e., those ‘looking for an excuse to lay waste (yakip yikmak icin bahane arayanlar)’ (Interviewee 5, NGO member). Doing so, they claim to be the true civil society that understands the actual needs of the people, aggrandizing the government’s populist rhetoric that associates all civil resistance with wanton destruction and justifying the marginalization of advocacy actors in the associational sphere.

This ‘constructive civil society versus destructive political opposition’ dichotomy is heavily promoted by the state-controlled media and supported through state resources. Local AKP governments subsidize Islamic NGOs’ events by providing conference venues and facilities, transportation, catering, printing, and audio-visual services. The events are advertised on the municipalities’ web sites, newsletters, and public relations bulletins. High-ranked state officials regularly attend NGOs’ higher-profile national and international events. The print newspapers, online news portals, and TV channels, including the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television (TRT), use the civil society organization label only when referring to Islamic organizations whereas all critical civic activism (e.g., events, petitions, press releases, sit-ins, and protests) are either unreported or framed in a language of threat to national peace and security.

Taken together, Islamic NGOs’ reconstruction of civil society discards all connotations to an autonomous and critical sphere of action that functions as a counterweight to state hegemony. The repackaging boils civil society down to its associational capacity and centralizes charitable giving. By reclaiming the philanthropic tradition and assuming a direct lineage, the organizations not only assert a position as the authentic strand of civil society in Turkey but also reproduce the party’s rhetoric that undermines rights-oriented actors’ claims to the public sphere.

Conclusion

This study has shown that the AKP government, throughout its almost two-decade rule, has implemented a combination of legal, administrative, and extralegal measures to capture the civil society space, undermine critical and claims-making organizations, and nurture its symbiotic non-state actors. Thriving under the ruling party’s patronage, Islamic charities and NGOs have articulated into the state’s welfare network, assisted with policy implementation, and mobilized political support at the grassroots level. The AKP–Islamic civil society partnership has not only colonized the associational sphere but also sought to delegitimate the ideational framework of civil society as an autonomous point of pressure that curbs prerogative state power and ensures vertical accountability. Islamic actors’ reconstruction of civil society reframes the core mission, social function, and political value of voluntary collective action in ways that legitimate the ruling government’s preferred state–civil society configuration. This state-sanctioned discourse promotes a polarized ‘us’ and ‘them’ juxtaposition that equates any rights-based claims-making with disruptive subversion and bolsters the symbiotic civil society actors’ claims to represent the true Turkish civil society.

The AKP government’s attitudes in engaging with civil society confirm the emerging civil society and neoauthoritarianism research program’s findings. The study supports Robertson’s (2009) and Levitsky and Way’s (2011) observations that contemporary authoritarian regimes do not rely solely on overt coercion for survival. Rather than quashing civil society altogether, the AKP government, like all hybrid regimes, tightly controls and monitors the public sphere using a combined strategy of securitization and incentivization. The Turkish case also resounds Flikke’s (2018) and Tarasenko’s (2018) findings on neoauthoritarian states’ strategic engagement with civil society. The AKP government has tightened its grip on the civic space by securitizing the associational sphere, instituting a restrictive and discretionary legal environment, and establishing clientelist networks of resource allocation.

The present study extends the nascent streams of the civil society and neoauthoritarianism research program by demonstrating that democratic decline and civic space erosion are not processes that ruling governments drive singlehandedly. The AKP–Islamic civil society partnership analyzed in this article suggests that symbiotic civil society actors are co-catalyzers of autocratic consolidation. In that respect, the study advances two contributions to the research program.

The article’s main contribution is proposing mutual constitution as a third model of state–civil society relationship in neoauthoritarian contexts. Analyzing direct and indirect means through which hybrid regimes restrict the civic space, the neoauthoritarianism and civil society scholarship has identified two patterns: marginalization or co-optation of civil society actors. In hybrid regimes, this research program has observed, civil society actors either refuse to cooperate with the ruling authority and are ultimately pushed out of the civic space altogether or comply with restrictive securitization practices and become co-opted. This analysis above has shown, on the other hand, that the marginalization versus co-optation taxonomy does not capture the ever-expanding space for non-state actors that promote illiberal agendas. In AKP’s Turkey, the case study suggests, the symbiosis between the political party and non-state actors accrue benefits to both parties and shifts the state–civil society equilibrium.

Thus, the article’s second contribution is directing attention to civil society actors who are active participants and co-constitutors of hegemonic regimes. The non-state actors in this study emanate from a well-established political Islamist movement that has also produced the ruling party. The political cadres of the regime and the Islamic organizations share the movement’s political culture, ideational framework, and a set of normative ideals for the nation. Different than civil society segments that the neoauthoritarianism and civil society literature has focused on, the Islamic charities and NGOs that partner with the AKP government are not GONGOs (e.g., Hsu, 2010), nor are they co-opted and captured by the state (e.g., Wischermann et al., 2018): they are stakeholders of a socio-political agenda. As such, their regime-legitimating function is not assigned top-down, but self-exerted.

Accordingly, the article urges the neoauthoritarianism and civil society scholarship to focus on the role of illiberal civil society actors in consolidating state authority. The global rise of right-wing populism and the ever-increasing public visibility of illiberal non-state actors require a research direction that is not only urgent but cross-cultural and multi-dimensional. This study has demonstrated that the discursive opportunity structures presented by the civil society framework are a critical dimension of the proposed research agenda. Islamic actors’ reconstruction of civil society in ways that accommodate AKP’s socio-political endeavors indicates a need for paying increased attention to how pro-regime non-state actors instrumentalize and adapt the liberal normative package of civil society in service of neoauthoritarian state practices and populist leaders. Another critical dimension of the proposed research direction, as evidenced by the analysis above, is the institutional opportunity structures presented by the formal organizational models of civil society. Islamic civil society’s mobilization trajectory from informal social solidarity networks to formal organizations that are articulated into the state apparatus suggests that the formal NGO model provides additional paths of access to domestic and transnational political platforms, institutional development, and capacity-building assistance. In political environments that lack transparency and accountability, the NGO format enables illiberal actors to capitalize on public resources made available by symbiotic political authorities. Therefore, a research effort that aims to understand the organizational bonds, elective affinities, and discursive inter-alliances between regimes and civil society actors must consider the ways in which formal organizational models of collection action bolster illiberal actors in neoauthoritarian contexts.

Footnotes

Appendix: NVivo coding structure nodes and categories

Civil society discourse (CSD)

Acknowledgements

The central argument and earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2018 International Society for Third-Sector Research Conference and the Project on Middle East Political Science Annual Conference in 2020. I would like to thank the conference organizers and the anonymous reviewers of Current Sociology for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

ORCID iD

Zeynep Atalay

Notes

Author biography

Zeynep Atalay is a political sociologist whose research interests include conservative civil society, neoauthoritarianism, and transnational social movements. Her recent research focuses on international authoritarian law and the worldwide diffusion of restrictive NGO legislation. She is currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at St. Mary’s College of California. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Maryland, College Park and served as a Visiting Scholar at the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford University. Her previous publications examine transnational Islamist NGO coalitions, instrumentalization of the civil society by conservative actors, neoliberal governmentality and reproduction of patriarchy, civil society as soft power, and neoauthoritarian state–trade union partnerships.

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