Depoliticization of Women's Organizations in Turkey

Following the post-Washington consensus the local authorities, private actors, civil society actors and families has been included to welfare provision. The functions and missions that civil society actors undertake have evolved in tandem with the transition to this welfare mix system. In addition to advocacy activities, service-based activities have been added to CSOs’ missions. While a group of scholars studying hybrid organizations forward that CSOs with hybrid missions could keep monitoring state policies and defending the rights of people while at the same time providing services, the growing critical literature note that CSOs turn into managerial partners of governments rather than rather than claimants that demand the fulfilling of citizens’ needs from state and bringing people’ issues into political agenda. Despite the growing critical literature investigating the effect of neoliberal restructuring over civil society, the link between the repositioning of civil society as a part of welfare mix system and the depoliticization of CSOs in Turkey remains understudied. This article contributes to this literature by way of pointing out how undertaking service-based activities create incentives for a depoliticized civil society in the context of Turkey. Drawing on interviews with women’s CSOs working on the economic participation of women, this article analyzes the activities and discourses of those CSOs regarding the women’s employment and their interaction with the state. Based on this literature, questions of this study are whether and how undertaking service-based activities depoliticize CSOs, whether undertaking service based activities undermine rights-based activities of CSOs. This article argues that engaging in service provision and development projects contribute to the depoliticization of hybrid CSOs because undertaking and maintaining service-based activities require cooperative mode of interaction with state and in return, both the capacity and interest of CSOs in developing rights based discourses that could go against the state has decreased.