Introduction

Relations between civil society and illiberal states are often fraught. Though civil society is frequently analyzed as a democratizing force (Putnam, 1993), scholars of non-democratic contexts emphasize how states may circumscribe oppositional civil society organizations (CSOs) while empowering ideologically aligned actors in order to consolidate power (Cavatorta, 2009; Hsu, 2010; Jamal, 2007; Lewis, 2013; Wiktorowicz, 2000). A state may also strategically delegate tasks to nonstate actors—even potentially oppositional groups—to preserve its fiscal and political strength (Brooke, 2019; Cammett & MacLean, 2014). Given that civil society in restrictive contexts is often analyzed through a regime alignment-versus-opposition binary (Toepler et al., 2020), it is easy to overlook the fact that many CSOs are more concerned with their day-to-day activities than with staking political positions. Moreover, organizations that work with state institutions do so in a variety of configurations, often with some discretion as to whether and how they engage the state (Stroup, 2019). The preservation of state capacity may explain why states delegate tasks to CSOs, but it does not explain how or why organizations engage state institutions. This paper asks: How do nonstate organizations carry out their programs in political contexts hostile to civil society activity?

Complementing much of the scholarship on state-civil society relations that prioritizes state action as the object of analysis, this paper focuses on organizational framing, strategizing, and justification of engagement with state institutions in a restrictive context. It examines the field of refugee support in Turkey, which does not break cleanly along political or ideological lines. After the Syrian conflict began in 2011, a range of CSOs in Turkey found themselves in alignment with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) policy of supporting refugees amid broader public opposition to generous refugee policy. The Turkish state’s Temporary Protection Regulation provided Syrian refugees with social rights, including access to free healthcare and education. NGOs, charities, and associations played an important role in facilitating access to these rights as well as providing their own aid and supplementary programming. A variety of CSOs worked with state institutions in project creation or implementation, while many others avoided registering with or gaining project approvals from the state.

In order to explain this variation, the paper draws on interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 with key personnel across 23 different nonstate organizations providing a range of refugee support services in Istanbul. I find that organizational interactions with the state are dictated by two main criteria: (1) an organization’s capacity, defined by its size, financial resources, and human resources which allow it to reach a large number of beneficiaries (Cammett & Luong, 2014:194–195), and (2) an organization’s identity, or the labels and codes it adopts and is assigned that make it legible to relevant audiences (Hsu & Hannan, 2005). Such signifiers include language used in mission statements and organization materials, the content and goals of organization projects, and organizational type. In the case of refugee reception in Turkey, organizational identities tend to cluster around recognizable categories like rights-based organizations or needs-based humanitarian or charity organizations. Other organizations that adopt ambiguous, non-conforming labels are less easily categorized.

I argue that capacity trumps identity in facilitating state-organization relations where extensive external funding flows in, whereas an organization’s identity is the primary factor in state-organization relations for lower-capacity organizations. High-capacity organizations across a range of identities cooperate with state institutions in order to reach a broad beneficiary base. The degree to which these organizations must compromise their own projects is nevertheless rooted in whether they are perceived as potential antagonists with rights-based agendas or as reliable partners supplementing state policy with humanitarian support. Lower-capacity organizations are more likely to comply with, avoid, or selectively engage state institutions depending on the codes they adopt. Rights-based organizations are strategic in how they engage the state, whereas other organizations distance themselves from state institutions by positioning as neutral humanitarians. More broadly, the paper contends that incorporating analysis of organizational identity into studies of civil society clarifies how assumptions of CSO alignment or opposition with the state are actually constructed, negotiated, and deployed in complex political fields.

Turkey’s Political Context

While Turkey has a long history of civil society activity, for decades associational life was largely oriented toward promoting state ideals (Bahçecik & Turhan, 2022). Civil society activity across the political spectrum increased with Turkey’s gradual turn toward Europe in the 1980s and 1990s (Tocci, 2005). A bid for European Union accession in the early 2000s led to growth in the number of civil society organizations, many with a democratizing thrust (Altan-Olcay & Icduygu, 2012; Keyman & Icduygu, 2003). During this period, the Turkish government liberalized laws on associations and foundations, loosening the degree of government control over organizations, including funding sources and external partnerships (Bikmen, 2005). Even so, the Department of Associations and the General Directorate of Foundations remained inconsistent in the ways they monitored civil society organizations, which continued to be subjected to onerous bureaucratic rules (Varon et al., 2014). Liberalization of CSO regulation reversed course after the AKP won a parliamentary majority in 2011. Following the Gezi Park protests in 2013, the government cracked down on anti-government activists and associated organizations (Sarfati, 2017). In 2015, after the predominantly Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) gained a foothold in parliament, the AKP initiated a military incursion in Kurdish regions and cracked down on Kurdish civil society actors (Aras & Duman, 2019). Soon after, a failed coup against the regime in July 2016 triggered heavy suppression across a broad swath of civil society, including NGOs, schools, media outlets, and vast cadres of civil servants. The coup and ensuing suppression increased skepticism of Western NGOs operating in Turkey (Mellen & Lynch, 2017).

Despite this intensifying crackdown and increasing authoritarianism, the number of civil society organizations in Turkey continued to grow (Yabanci, 2019). Part of this growth can be attributed to the organizations that emerged to support the rising Syrian refugee population within Turkey’s borders (Sunata & Tosun, 2019). A variety of organizations constitute the “welfare mix” providing support to Syrian refugees, including international organizations, national NGOs, local grassroots organizations, and religious charities as well as state institutions at the national, provincial, and local levels (Yilmaz, 2019). The negotiation of a deal between the European Union and Turkey in 2016 provided six billion euros of funding for humanitarian assistance to Syrians in exchange for securitizing its border to prevent migrants from traveling to Europe. The EU Facility for Refugees has disbursed these funds to projects managed by UN agencies via INGOs, NGOs, and state institutions (Mandıracı, 2020). As a result, a bevy of CSOs have continued to operate in the field of refugee support, even as the state has consolidated its refugee reception regime and cracked down on civil society activity.

NGOs and the State

In non-democratic contexts, states may use a tangle of bureaucratic regulations to keep civil society organizations under control while repressing the potential for organizations to emerge autonomously from the state (Wiktorwicz, 2000). Scholars of the Middle East have argued that civil society can exist as an element of “liberalized autocracy” characterized by state control of opposition with limited space for nonstate organizational activity (Anderson, 2006; Brumberg, 2002; Cavatorta & Durac, 2011). While a large segment of civil society scholarship focuses on the effect of state-civil society relations on democratization outcomes, there is also a growing literature that examines the nature and forms of state-CSO relations. Scholars of East Asia, for example, identify patterns of regulation, cooptation, negotiation, alliance, marginalization, and avoidance to explain configurations of state-CSO relations. The mechanisms to explain these interactional outcomes, however, vary; research differentially highlights state regulatory reach (Shieh & Schwartz, 2009), varying levels of elite competition (Heurlin, 2010), and organizational opportunity structures and the characteristics of organization employees (Hsu & Jiang, 2015) to explain outcomes in state-NGO relations.

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. Studies also account for the ways the state actively refashions civil society around its ideological agenda. In the gender rights field, organizations close to the ruling party are empowered while other groups’ activities are circumscribed (Doyle, 2017, 2018). Often, assumptions of alignment with or opposition to the state are starting points for analysis in explaining outcomes in state-NGO relations. Less attention is paid to the ways these relations are negotiated by organizations (Özler & Obach, 2018; Sarkissian & Özler, 2013).

While political or ideological proximity is a useful heuristic for thinking about state-civil society relations, political favor or disfavor are not the only determinants of these interactions. State-CSO relations may be shaped by the content of specific activities and issues at hand (Bahçecik & Turhan, 2022). In service provision contexts, the balance between state capacity and organizational capacity determines whether states will control nonstate organizational service delivery or deliver goods jointly with organizations (Brooke, 2019; Cammett & MacLean, 2014). An explanation of state-CSO relations must therefore account for organizational capacity and organizational activities without resting on overbroad assumptions of pro-or anti-government orientations.

Organizational Identity: Categorizing Refugee-Supporting Organizations

In Turkey, the state will sometimes “extend its political power through…NGOs” that carry out projects that advance a ruling-party agenda (Eder, 2010: 181). Multiple studies of refugee reception in Turkey examine how the state prioritizes Islamically-motivated organizations while closing NGOs it sees as threatening (Aras & Duman, 2019), controlling organizations that are not trusted (Memisoglu & Ilgit, 2017), or displacing them with government-created or loyal actors (Danış & Nazlı, 2019; Sunata & Tosun, 2019). These analyses focus on the religio-political compatibility or antagonism between the state and organizations. Nimer (2020) broadens this focus to include how the ability to harness external funding can lead otherwise ideologically unaligned organizations to work in cooperation with the state. This point is critical, as it highlights the fact that relationships between state institutions and refugee-supporting organizations are also affected by other actors in the broader global refugee reception field, especially insofar as they shape organizational capacity. Organizations navigate this terrain deliberately, balancing interactions with state institutions, beneficiaries, benefactors, and other stakeholders (Akşak & Dimitrova, 2021).

Given that external stakeholders determine organizational funding, partnerships, and ultimately survival, organizations adopt coherent identities that can be understood and evaluated by these audiences (Hsu & Hannan, 2005; Zuckerman, 1999). Organizational identities are partially animated by what members see as central, enduring, and distinctive features of the organization (Albert & Whetten, 1985). Yet given the importance of audience evaluation, organizations are also mindful of labels and categories that signal specific types of commitments. A categorical distinction commonly made by actors and audiences in the refugee field is that between “rights-based” organizations on the one hand and “needs-based” or Muslim humanitarian organizations on the other (Boşnak, 2021; Mackreath & Sagnic, 2017). Yet, these distinctions are not necessarily clear in organizational activities. Moreover, some scholars suggest there is no rights-based movement in refugee support in Turkey; instead, organizations have largely focused on apolitical “service-oriented action” due to the restrictive environment (Paker, 2019; Paker & Keyman, 2020: 110). The categories of “rights” and “needs” serve as labels that are legible to external stakeholders. Given that the language of rights-based development is a dominant paradigm among Western aid agencies, the label serves as a legitimizing signal to a broad swath of funding agencies (Kindornay et al., 2012). In the Turkish context, however, the language of “rights-based” activities is counterposed against the ruling party’s increasingly undemocratic policies. Rather than taking the binaries that characterize refugee organizations at face value, the paper examines how these categories are deployed, combined, and assigned meaning, and what their implications are for relations with the state.

Methodology

This paper relies on 23 interviews conducted with nonstate organization personnel in 2018 and 2019. The data combine interviews from two periods of data collection that had different sets of questions but overlapped in their interrogation of organizational relations with state agencies. Seven of the interviews were conducted with managers of refugee healthcare organizations in the summer of 2018 as a part of a larger project examining refugees’ access to healthcare. Organizations were located using a list of providers retaining Syrian doctors published online as well as through Facebook and word-of-mouth. These interviews interrogated how organizations navigated their encounters with street-level bureaucrats and Health Ministry personnel, how and why they registered their organizations (or not), and how and why they would, in some cases, avoid state encounters.

The 16 interviews conducted in 2019 included a broader range of nonstate organizations that provide services including health support, educational support, legal support, employment training, and material aid. Interviews focused on organizational programming and relations with state entities and other organizations. I created a list of organizations operating in the refugee support field in Istanbul using the report “Civil Society and Syrian Refugees in Turkey” (Mackreath & Sagnic, 2017) as well as a web of organizations catalogued online called “Syrian Refugees and NGOs in Turkey.”Footnote 1 This list was supplemented with additional organizations I had encountered in Istanbul since 2016 as well as recommendations from fellow academics. In total, I compiled a list of 40 organizations, 35 of which I was able to contact. Sixteen agreed to participate in interviews between September and November of 2019.

I conducted most of the interviews in Turkish with organization personnel. A handful of interviews were conducted in English, and interviews with Syrian-run organizations were conducted in Arabic with the assistance of an Arabic-English translator. Interviews averaged one hour. I began with standardized, closed questions to collect data on organization features, including number of employees, registration status, mission, and types of programs. I then expanded into open-ended questions which incorporated personnel interpretations about how and why organizations built relationships with other actors in the refugee field to carry out programs (Viterna & Maynard, 2002). These later questions elicited responses in which respondents drew on “self-concepts” of the organization in relation to the state, which was critical to analyzing the labels, meanings, and political valences shaping organizational identities (Lamont & Swidler, 2014: 159).

The interviews were transcribed and coded using atlas.ti software. Following Deterding and Waters’s (2018) suggestions for qualitative data analysis, broad codes were first assigned to differentiate interactions between the organizations and state institutions, including registration processes, protocol approval processes, partnerships with local, provincial, or national state bodies, and enforcement encounters. I then applied more fine-grained codes identifying to what extent interactions were collaborative, compromising, compliant, and/or avoidant based on how the organizations described and justified the encounters. The responses were then analyzed “across respondent attributes” (Deterding & Waters, 2018: 8). These attributes included organizational features mentioned explicitly by interviewees as critical to state-CSO relations as well as other attributes emerging from the data. These included systematically used labels such as rights-based, needs-based, humanitarian, and community-based, among others. I combined salient features into two main analytical categories: organizational capacity and organizational identity.

The study was conducted in Istanbul, where most Turkish civil society organizations are headquartered, including all but one of the organizations in this study. On the one hand, this is beneficial for the analysis, as interviews broached both high-level administrative and on-the-ground activities. On the other hand, it leaves out other organizations operating outside of Istanbul. Provinces in the Syrian border regions also host many nonstate refugee support organizations, and organizational dynamics differ; for example, in the border region, international organizations are more active as purveyors of aid and services within Syria. Yet while organizational experiences in Istanbul may be qualitatively different than those in other provinces throughout the country, I contend that the modes of state-organization interaction proposed in this paper are generalizable to other contexts in which the state restricts civil society while simultaneously depending on its resources.

Findings: Organizational Capacity and Organizational Identity

Organizational features are summarized in the Table in the Appendix A. Organizational capacity is a broad concept, but it can be operationalized using concrete indicators of an organization’s ability to carry out projects to reach many beneficiaries. Resource aggregation is a key element of an organization’s capacity to mobilize (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). Moreover, organizations must channel resources effectively. Measures of organizational capacity include the age and size of an organization, how formalized or institutionalized it is, and the amount and type of funding and political resources it can harness (Eisinger, 2002; Suarez & Marshall, 2014). In this paper, organizational capacity is approximated using a combination of key indicators: geographic scope of refugee support operations, number of employees, how long an organization has been operational, and external funding sources.Footnote 2

Funding sources for refugee projects are the most important indicator, given that they enhance organizational capacity relative to state institutions. Time of establishment and number of employees are used as a proxy for organizational institutionalization and professionalization. I categorize organizations with fewer than 50 employees, operations that do not expand beyond Istanbul, and low external funding coming from donations or small grants as low capacity. High-capacity organizations are more variable: some work only in Istanbul but still bring in a variety of international funds (for example, Organization 21). Organizations that can employ more than 50 employees and work in multiple provinces are categorized as high capacity. For organizations that span both low and high categories across indicators, I arbitrate based on the breadth of their operations in comparison with other clearly low- or high-capacity organizations. A few organizations still fall in an ambiguous space, which I categorize as medium capacity and address briefly in the conclusion.

Organizational identity combines three indicators: type of organization, type of activities, and, most importantly, key self-descriptors. Organization type indicates (1) if an organization is managed by foreigners, refugees, or Turkish personnel and (2) whether and how an organization is locally registered. Whether an organization appears foreign or local matters both for how it situates itself in local political contestations as well as how state institutions perceive it. Self-categorizations are key descriptors drawn directly from interview data where employees answered questions about organizational goals and purpose, as well as from mission and values statement published on organizational websites and in yearly activity reports. Finally, a summary of activities animates the self-categorizations and provides more details about the organizations examined in the paper. It is important to note that many organizations feature indicators that span both rights and needs identities, falling in a neutral service-oriented space. In these cases, audiences may categorize organizations based on selected features. As a result, a non-conforming organization may be categorized as “rights-based” or “needs-based” depending on how the state fixates on specific salient features.

High-Capacity Organizations

This paper finds that when organizations have high capacity, they will partner with state institutions to achieve shared goals in refugee support. High-capacity organizations take on a role as agents of state institutions for projects where their goals are aligned, however narrowly (Shapiro, 2005). Organizational identities matter insofar as how they cooperate with state institutions and external funders. Organizations that coalesce around refugee protection activities either self-categorize as or are categorized by the state as “rights-based”; these organizations, which harness ample INGO and Western NGO funds, make programmatic compromises in order to jointly implement projects with state institutions. While their rights-based agendas help harness international funding, they make ruling-party actors wary of possible anti-government claims-making. Those, on the other hand, that frame their projects around needs, humanitarianism, and charity, and receive funds from international Islamic organizations signal greater alignment with the state objective of providing aid to vulnerable Muslim refugees (Memisoglu & Ilgit, 2017). These organizations enter collaborative arrangements with state institutions. There are two main exceptions: first, when an organization spans rights and needs codes, it has more difficulty justifying itself to the state as a reliable partner. Second, if a high-capacity organization is already fully enmeshed with the state, its identity matters primarily as a signal to external actors rather than domestic institutions, leading to the existence of collaborative rights-based organizations.

Compromised Cooperation

Compromised cooperation is the result of pragmatic arrangements between state institutions and organizations on narrowly aligned goals. Self-defined rights-based organizations are often at odds with the state’s increasingly anti-democratic policies. But in refugee reception, they align on the basic goal of connecting Syrian refugees to their social rights. One domestic rights-based NGO with well over 500 employees clearly explained: “We are not a humanitarian aid organization; we are a rights-based organization. So, our main concern is helping people claim their rights…we take a bridging and counseling role and advise people on how to access the services they are entitled to” (Organization 16). This organization, funded by agencies such as UNICEF, the American Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (BPRM), and Germany’s main development agency GIZ, served as a partner for state project implementation even as it adjusted to a heightened regulatory environment with a significant reduction in programmatic autonomy. A representative described their language education programs in the restrictive context:

Since 2017, everything we do is with protocols…we used to be able to do programs on our own…but now the Ministry of Education approves those it deems appropriate…to be frank this is not the wrong approach, it’s appropriate, because otherwise it’s hard to know what organizations are teaching. I think Turkish language instruction for foreigners is greatly improved now, to be honest (Organization 16).


By compromising some autonomy, the organization was able to connect beneficiaries to high quality services. The Ministry of Education, meanwhile, was able to externalize some of the cost and operations of education programs to the organization (Nimer, 2020). This example accords with previous scholarship that explains how the state contains (Yabanci, 2019) or coopts (Doyle, 2018) nonstate organizations. But, in this case there is goal alignment—facilitating access to quality services—in which compromise of autonomy has a beneficial outcome; it cannot be analyzed solely as state extension of power.

Multiple other organizations addressed how high capacity leads to practical partnerships between organizations and state institutions (Organizations 14, 17, 21, 22). A representative of one large domestic NGO described the relative ease Organization 16 (discussed above) had in carrying out projects: “Compared to us they have much bigger teams. And they work with more funds. So they have an easier time with permissions and they also have more dialogue with the state. And they can operate more comfortably. We look a little too European, everyone thinks we’re an INGO; we have to remind them we’re not” (Organization 17). This organization, though also high capacity, operated in a less legible category space to its audiences. “We’re a humanitarian organization. We are not Amnesty International, we do needs-assessments in the field,” they explained. Nevertheless, because their leaders participate in European Union dialogues on issues of refugee protection, sending representatives to Brussels, they are externally categorized by state institutions as a Western-facing advocacy organization. They partner narrowly with state institutions, including funding and implementing of Ministry of Education programs for language education and employment training.

Collaborative Cooperation

High-capacity organizations with more legible needs-based missions, particularly those that have an Islamic humanitarian motivation to their work, are more likely to collaborate with state institutions at the policy level, even as they adopt outwardly neutral politics. As one Islamic health NGO president explained: “On July 15, Turkey experienced a coup. After that the state’s orientation toward civil society changed…they ask, who are you? Are you linked to GülenFootnote 3?…[but] our work didn’t change…We don’t have political demands…we don’t get involved in politics. So, we haven’t had any trouble” (Organization 23).

In fact, the organization collaborated with state institutions and participated in policy discussions in an advisory role: “Sometimes we face some challenges with mid-level bureaucrats but in general the Health Ministry invites us to its meetings, we describe ourselves, and we give recommendations.” The organization has ample funding from both European Union institutions and Islamic organizations based in the Gulf region. Along with a cadre of other high-capacity Turkish aid organizations in Islamic charity networks, including Organizations 1, 11, and 19, this organization also assists with aid delivery to Syrians in Turkey and across the border in Northern Syria. These aid projects buttress Turkey’s geopolitical efforts to exert de facto political control into Syrian territory.

Finally, some high-capacity organizations emerged after Syrian refugees began arriving in Istanbul. Despite their late arrival to the field, they have managed to institutionalize and partner effectively with state bodies. In contrast to the organizations that deploy humanitarian labels, these organizations use the language of legal rights protection. One example is an “NGO” run by local municipal government employees in an Istanbul neighborhood with a high Syrian refugee population. An administrator explained how the association was created by the deputy mayor of the municipality after 2011 for the express purpose of harnessing external funding for refugee projects; this is because municipal governments do not have adequate social service budgets to provide refugee services, and international funds are funneled to NGOs in Turkey rather than municipalities. Given the organization’s inextricable ties with a ruling-party aligned municipal government, the onerous regulatory environment posed few barriers to organizational operations.

As an administrator put it, “Of course, being tied to the municipality makes these things easier. Or else a five-year-old NGO would not be able to get the projects we get approved this quickly. They try but they can’t. They can’t attain our reputation, they can’t work this fast for protocol signatures, for partnerships with the ministries. It’s impossible. In Turkey, it’s impossible” (Organization 21). The organization’s direct government ties counteracted its latecomer status, bolstering its capacity. The administrator went on to describe the power structure that grants them approvals. “When the ministries and directorates get together, they invite us. Then, from the top down, they create partnerships with us. Because we’re a municipality, we know the field really well, that’s a big advantage…We have an unbelievable capacity in creating partnerships.” The organization is a clear extension of state power into civil society through a nominally nongovernmental organization (Eder, 2010). Yet much of its success comes from its ability to garner funds from INGOs all over the world and is internationally acclaimed as a paragon of best practices in rights protection for refugees.

In sum, high-capacity organizations that are either highly institutionalized or otherwise able to harness large amounts of external funding partner with state institutions in implementing refugee-supporting projects. Their identities—both in terms of how they frame their activities and how state actors and funding agencies view them—matter secondarily. Identities shape how organizations engage with state institutions and/or funders. Organizations identified as rights-based, protection-oriented organizations are more likely to compromise in project implementation, whereas humanitarian, needs-based organizations with an Islamic charity orientation may partner with the state in achieving broader geopolitical goals. Organizations already steeped in state institutional networks, on the other hand, frame their identities primarily toward international funding agencies.

Lower-Capacity Organizations

Most refugee-supporting organizations do not have broad reach and extensive external funding. Smaller organizations tend to have a targeted set of programs that they implement in the field. They must still strategically navigate interactions with state institutions, from registration processes to the implementation of projects. These organizations are not of practical use to state institutions for the externalization of provision tasks, given their smaller budgets and limited personnel. As such, the power imbalance between state and organization is starker, and the point of encounter with state institutions is centered on applying for permissions and program protocols. Lower-capacity organizations either selectively engage/avoid state institutions or embrace a neutral identity as justification for operating autonomously. Positioning as rights-based or community/aid oriented is centrally important to their interactions with the state.

Selective Engagement and Strategic Avoidance among Rights-Based Organizations

Organizations that identify as rights-based tread cautiously in their interactions with state institutions. Unlike their larger counterparts, small rights-based organizations offer limited benefit to expanding state capacity to reach refugee populations. Without this benefit, their function as conduits for claims-making is a political nuisance. Invoking clear categories, one administrator of a small organization described difficulties in running programs in the post-coup environment: “Rights-based programs with a human rights perspective have been especially affected in the current situation. Our capacity to work in the public sphere has shrunk a lot at this point…So, we have to find new ways to carry out programs…we’ve started doing online programs to limit risk.”Footnote 4 Instead of dealing with state agencies, this organization adapted its educational program for teachers working with refugee students in a way that would protect the organization and its program participants from state intervention (Organization 18). This avoidance also allowed the organization to make adversarial claims that may have been stymied under more direct regulation. The organization maintained a strong political motivation in its daily work: “Our main focus is democratization; we could say [democratic] transformation is our basic aim…we deal with various topics including transparency, participation, and rights.” In this sense, the organization’s avoidance of state protocols may have reduced the reach of activities the organization could carry out, but it also helped minimize the moderating effects that regulation can have on pursuing organization goals.

Even so, smaller organizations that identify as rights-based organizations were not completely avoidant of the state. Rather, they maneuvered local institutions to find those with which they could partner while remaining wary of antagonistic institutions. Another self-categorized rights organization explained that they advocate for refugees who are marginalized by existing policies, including Kurdish Syrians and Doms.Footnote 5 They noted the challenges of carrying out programs. “[T]he protocols are so tough. There are some who get them but they’re mostly large organizations and even for them the requirements are really limiting.” They lamented that given the state’s distrust of rights-based organizations, their funding has dried up. Yet they find ways to gain institutional support for programs by creating strategic state partnerships.

We can’t work with our own municipality because they come and question us, they’re AKP. But we can work with [an opposition-run] municipality….We’re able to form really nice partnerships with the municipalities that are open to a rights-based approach but unfortunately the one we are located in is not one of those (Organization 14).


By keeping actions geographically targeted, the organization was able to enhance its capacity without compromising its commitment to advocate on behalf of marginalized members of the community.

Other organizations, in contrast, emphasized a neutral stance as community-oriented humanitarian organizations while minimizing their capacity in order to bypass bureaucratic challenges. One manager described their organization:

It’s not registered, it’s a volunteer-run space. We did try to register earlier…And then we submitted our paper at the time just before the coup happened. So then things got stuck and a lot of people who were on the board either backed off or left, you know, because the situation was so fragile…And because we were not thinking of expanding or going beyond what we were doing at that point, like getting funding from large grant or funding agencies, we didn’t really think that it made much of a difference if we are registered or unregistered” (Organization 12).


The organization leadership decided that small workshops and in-kind aid distribution in the community were sufficiently neutral. They kept their operations modest while partnering with organizations that are officially registered for any larger-scale outreach. Moreover, they were able to continue their operations quite comfortably even with the knowledge of street-level bureaucrats. “The municipality and the muhtarsFootnote 6 know about us. The municipality also used to send us stuff to distribute, but they never bothered us.” They developed a neutral needs-based orientation as the key to their unobtrusive existence in the neighborhood.

Lower-capacity organizations that may have previously had missions with potentially political valences also neutralized their own operations over time to avoid state intervention and work autonomously. Organization 8, which used to provide services to a marginalized Christian Syrian group, had over time become a more general community center for migrants and locals. After the post-coup crackdown on CSOs, they tread cautiously. “When the [restrictive education] legislation was passed we didn’t do anything for seven to eight months….During that time we were so scared that a government official would show up unannounced and say, ‘What are you doing here?’…they were closing so many organizations at the time, and we knew they wouldn’t feel bad closing us down.” Over time, they gradually implemented small lessons and community-building activities that they did not call “education,” avoiding protocol registration processes they assumed would be unsuccessful. For small organizations, local community-oriented neutrality proved sufficient for continuing operations in peace. The findings of the paper are summarized in Table 1:

Table 1 How organizational identity and organizational capacity shape outcomes in state-CSO relations in refugee support
Full size table

Discussion and Conclusion

Much of the existing research on state-civil society relations in non-democratic contexts in general, and in Turkey in particular, designate organizations as aligned with or opposed to ruling regime policies as a starting point for analysis. In contrast, this paper has focused on a field where state policies and organizational goals may overlap across a complex political terrain. Moreover, in the refugee field, external actors centrally shape state and organizational capacity to carry out projects. Domestic political contestations are just one factor that shapes state-organization relations. For this reason, rather than assuming allegiance or opposition between organizations and the state a priori, this paper has analyzed how organizations situate themselves in relation to the state and funding agencies by invoking a range of labels and categories to represent their work. Their external identification by both international and domestic audiences shapes their relations with the state. Organizational identities must first be invoked and interpreted by relevant actors before they can explain interactional outcomes.

The paper has presented a framework that accounts for organizational identity and capacity to explain how organizations in a restrictive state context variably interact with state institutions. When organizations have high capacity, particularly buttressed by external funding, they will carry out projects in partnership with state institutions across a political spectrum. Organizational identity dictates whether this relationship will be one of compromise with narrow goal alignment or broader collaboration in project generation and implementation. In cases where state-CSO relations are already firmly established, identities are molded to appeal to external funders. For lower-capacity organizations, organizational identity shapes whether and how organizations engage state institutions. The more adversarial the organizational identity to ruling-party policies, the more strategically the organization will navigate permissions and partnerships with state institutions. More neutral-presenting organizations can circumvent registration and other formal bureaucratic procedures, operating autonomously.

It bears emphasis that some organizations do not fit neatly into what is necessarily a simplified framework. Some organizations, for example, have significant capacity in one specific service area due to a large project-based grant from a funding agency (Organizations 9, 15, 22). In these cases, organizations often register and carry out their projects according to state strictures, without invoking language or labels with political valences in the Turkish context. Instead, they draw on notions of community, empowerment, social responsibility, and inclusion. This is particularly true of foreign organizations that register and work locally in Turkey. Their interactions with the state are marked by regulatory oversight, and organizations will often compromise to be able to carry out their specific projects.

As Nimer (2020) argues, and this paper further underscores, it is critical to consider actors beyond the state when analyzing state-civil society relations. Further research should test this framework across different policy or aid fields where actors outside the country of focus—INGOs, states with development funding, and other funding agencies—may have an interest in improving local conditions. This could include development aid in agriculture, healthcare or education, natural disaster relief, or post-conflict aid. Additionally, this study has focused on only one city. Whether these patterns are consistent across different regions remains a question to be empirically tested. Finally, more fine-grained analysis of funding ledgers could further elucidate and hone the framework by examining variation within high-capacity organizations in terms of how certain types of funding may lead to varied configurations of state-organization interactions. Alignment with and opposition to non-democratic state institutions are critical to shaping state-civil society relations. Yet CSOs operate in complex environments where their activities may not break along clear political cleavages. This qualitative study has sought to shed light on how state-CSO relationships are actively framed, negotiated, compromised, and re-cast by organizations in light of pragmatic considerations to effectively implement programs.