Senior Social and Political Sciences student,
Sibel Oktay, will give a talk at the “21st Annual Middle East
History and Theory Conference”, organized by the Center for Middle Eastern
Studies at the University of Chicago, 12-13 May 2006.
Below you can find the abstract for her talk.
Detailed information about the conference can be found at http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/mehat/conference.html
We wish her success in her studies.
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“Civil Society and Foreign Donors, A Case
Study: Turkey and the Open Society Institute”
Civil society becomes an
ambivalent concept in countries where certain preconditions are not satisfied,
such as the presence of an industrialized and modernized society. At the same
time, the absence of civil society makes democratization a far more difficult
process. While democratization and the awakening of civil society work on a
complementary basis, foreign efforts for establishing democracy increasingly
focus on empowering civil society of the target country. At such a junction,
Turkey is a case worth looking at because of its unique characteristics: beside
the material and legal constraints for a lively civil society, Turkey has a
strong civic-republican state tradition embedded in all aspects of social life
(including, of course, its civil society). Ironically, Turkish civil society
receives foreign aid to empower itself with a higher political orientation,
from organizations such as the Open Society Institute (OSI), which signals the
spread of globalization to areas other than economics. Although the Associate
Foundation of OSI (OSIAF) launched in Turkey in 2001 takes a rather cautious
stance in terms of foreign donorship, its presence nonetheless brings the everlasting
nationalist and xenophobic sentiments to Turkish society, especially in the
light of what Mr Soros has been accused of doing in countries such as Georgia,
let alone the criticisms in the literature on civil society directed to foreign
donorship. As a country standing on the threshold of EU membership, Turkey
becomes an important exam to be passed both for the OSI and the Union.
