The declining welfare state in Turkey since the 1980s has privatized many social services publicly provided in the past. For the poor, however, paying for these services proves to be impossible. Justice and Development Party (JDP) has reformed and launched various social assistance policies in response to increasing level of poverty since 2003. As a custodian, the Ministry of Family, Work, and Social Services transferred the implementation of those polices to non-governmental organizations and local administrations. However, a closer examination suggests that a new welfare system has been emerging that is not right-based but rather arbitrary, selective and clientelist. One significant characteristics of the beneficiaries of social assistance programs are that they are mostly women. This paper aims to provide demographic characteristics about this group who receive both cash transfers and in-kind assistance. The assistance programs are of utmost importance for the survival of the poor. The programs, however, are far from getting the poor out of the poverty-social assistance cycle but make them dependence of this irregular and unreliable support that increases during critical times for political support. This paper, part of a book project that aims to study the social assistance programs their characteristics in Turkey, relies on both qualitative data and Household Budget Surveys by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TUIK) (2003-2016). The latter allow one to identify individuals by gender and social classes that they belong. It is also possible to categorize social assistance by type (e.g., in-kind and cash) and the source (e.g., the state, non-governmental organizations, municipalities, etc.).

Since 2003, the Justice and Development Party’s (JDP) has transformed what is often referred to as Turkey’s “old,” “corporatist,” and “populist” welfare system into a synthesis of Islamic conservatism and neoliberalism. In that sense, JDP closely follows the global trends in social policy practices: moving from traditional welfare state through decentralization and enabling a key role for non-governmental organizations such as faith-based civil society organizations. This research evaluates the outcome of the transformation in social policy and its potential implications for both social protection and politics by analyzing Household Budget Survey micro-data between 2003 and 2016. The data allow us to identify social classes and analyze various social protection transfers by social class and gender at the individual level. The results suggest that the JDP’s social policy practices reduce social protection to a mere management of a risk (i.e., poverty) or a safety net measure, for the poorest of the poor. Although welfare transfers are small in size at the aggregate level, they have significant implications with respect to social classes and genders. For example, while non-working population of which majority are housewives, unpaid family workers, unemployed, and retirees are increasingly becoming the dependent of such transfers, the new type of policy has widened the gap between men and women when it comes to their level of dependency on welfare transfers. JDP’s policies do not seem to be efficient in terms of mitigating poverty let alone eradication of it. On the contrary, they raise concerns about equity and dependency on welfare transfers. As repeatedly pointed out in the literature, JDP’s practice of social policy paves the way for building a clientelist relationship between the party and the recipients in the short run, and for a social engineering practice to create a new conservative society that is disciplined by poverty.

This paper offers a feminist reading of the neoliberal knowledge production regimes in Turkey’s universities. In doing so, I problematize the connection between neoliberal order of things and religio-authoritarian style of policy making in the (re-)production, circulation and exchange of knowledge. I start from the argument that Turkey’s academic life has been restructured in line with the ongoing regime change in the country. I try to delineate the historical pattern that grounded the dialectics of this restructuration. The paper is composed of three main parts. In the first part, I draw an outline of the neoliberal effect on the academe at a global scale. This part also contains a brief historical backdrop to the current state of affairs in Turkey’s university settings. In the second part, I discuss the most recent reshuffle in the universities in the country (2016- ) that accompanied the most massive academic purge in its history. In the third part, I look at the pros and consof initiatives for knowledge-production that host counter and/or alternative opportunity spaces against the neoliberal order of things. The analysis that runs through the paper is based on an inter-textual reading of Turkey’s post-1980 experience with neoliberalism with a view to the universities. Thus, I rely on historico-institutional reading of the background to the current university system in Turkey. I also bring in (auto-)ethnographic reading of the most recent displacements in academic life of the country – interviews and conversations with participants to counter and/or alternative knowledge production venues and field notes from within the venues.

A structural problem that lies behind the persistence of poverty in Turkey will be analysed through the existence of two vicious circles. In the first, poverty brings difficulties (via a set of reasons) to poor families in reaching high-quality education for their kids, which results in low human capital of the new generation, who will be unable to find secure and well-paid jobs in the formal sector and thus be obliged to go for the informal one, with the result that they will find themselves also trapped in the poverty threshold. In the second, given the existence of high level of informality, as a result of which taxes are evaded, a rather low level of public revenues compared to the national income is collected, which brings about a small magnitude of resources being allocated to social assistance, as a result of which poverty eradication gets a too little resource. Through this analytical framework, it will be argued that a structural operation is needed so as to properly tackle with the poverty issue in Turkey.

One of the distinguishing features of AKP’s rule has been its 'success' in implementing a program of neoliberalization. In practice, this has not only transformed rural life by opening up the countryside for new forms of accumulation through a variety of extractive processes. It has also brought with it an infrastructural boom evidenced in a variety of construction projects, ranging from the mundane (e.g. mass housing developments) to what Erdogan himself described as 'crazy' (e.g. the world's largest airport). These transformations have faced some of the most visible and sustained attempts at resisting the rule of the AKP as evidenced by the Gezi Park uprising as well as countless smaller movements in the countryside that oppose the construction of highways, coal power plants, and micro-hydroelectric dam projects. These attempts at resistance have come to be seen not only as the potential spark for the creation of a powerful peasant movement (outside of Kurdish politics) but also as potential conduits for the creation of a more inclusive, democratic and sustainable alternative to the model offered by neoliberalism. This paper problematizes these narratives by locating contemporary environmental politics of Turkey within a longer-term reading of state-society relationships. Specifically, it argues that rather than a revolt against neoliberalism as a political order or against its implications for development policy, these movements can be interpreted as struggles over the control of the state itself. In so doing, the paper contrasts environmental conflicts in Turkey with struggles observed in South America or South Asia. Unlike the latter examples where conflicts primarily take the shape of 'environmentalism of the poor' that questions the desirability and possibility of long-term economic growth, resistance movements in Turkey continue to articulate a vision of development that resonates with the Turkish state's long-standing ambition of 'catching up' with industrialized nations.