This paper situates human rights training programs for state officials and government workers in Turkey within the larger framework of “good governance,” which underlies the public administration reforms undertaken for the country’s ongoing accession to the European Union (EU). A period of the reorganization of the governmental field through capacity-building and professionalization, this “harmonization process” is marked by a corpus of terms related to professionalism – such as expertise and rationalization – becoming increasingly relevant for public administration. Through socialization processes (such as human rights trainings) security forces, members of the judiciary, healthcare providers and other state officials learn to become experts by acquiring specific repertoires and occupational habits (Brenneis 1994, Carr 2010). The explicit purpose of these efforts is to transform public administration from a realm that produces hierarchy to a systematic apparatus that produces service, by installing a specific model through which the state officials should relate to citizens, to their profession, and to each other. This model requires that the state officials cooperate with each other towards producing service, and that they relate to citizens not as paternalistic supervisors of pastoral care, but as professional, "indifferent" service providers (Herzfeld 1992). Although this form of relationship is delineated as one that should be devoid of emotions and politics, human rights training programs end up promoting individual initiative, personal discretion, conscience and care in order to address the difficulties that are broached by the state functionaries, emanating from their everyday governmental practices.