The civil society literature often focuses on the question of whether Islamic organizations in the Middle East are autonomous from public institutions, political parties and state power. This question is shaped by the dominant scholarly framework which equates autonomy with political legitimacy: Islamic organizations are included in the domain of civil society to the extent that they can prove their independent “non-governmental” status. The existence, or lack of political autonomy is also frequently used as a measure of democratic governance. The underlying assumption is that a country is more likely to become (or remain) democratic if it has a plethora of civic organizations that operate independently of state power. Such a focus on political autonomy, however, overlooks other strategies through which Islamic organizations claim NGO legitimacy. In contrast, this paper examines how Islamic NGOs in Turkey perform legitimacy through adopting the technical language of “audit culture” (Strathern 2000). Instead of emphasizing the norm of political autonomy, these Islamic organizations instead focus on the norm of transparency as the penultimate measure of good governance. To this end, these organizations provide extensive narrative reports, perform frequent financial audits, and use a range of data collection instruments as well as performance indicators. They also make information about charitable donations and the amount and kind of aid distributed to the poor available to the public through online and print publications. Put another way, the primary concern of Islamic NGOs in Turkey has become the collection, management, and standardization of information about their donors and recipients. By examining how these organizations approached governance as a “technical” instead of a “political” matter, this paper shows the limits of the democracy bias that is dominant in the civil society literature. I argue that the rise of a managerial logic among Islamic NGOs is best understood as a form of depoliticization. Furthermore, I also discuss how these NGOs legitimized the construct of good-governance-as-transparency with reference to Ottoman institutions and Islamic ethics. Evidence is drawn from a 14-month ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Islamic charity organizations in Turkey in 2009-2010 and 2012-2013.

Revolutions and mobilisations in the region showed that mainstream civil society actors such as human rights NGOs and other liberal-minded organisations, which had been dubbed the 'usual suspects' and charged with democratizing potential, have not been at the forefront of the upheavals. Consequently, attention has been devoted to the examination of informal networks of activists, everyday forms of resistance, 'de-centralised' activism and marginal groups of (non)citizens. Empirical innovations focused on the politicisation of what, previously, had wrongly been perceived as a-political or non-political. As a consequence, the issue of civil society and the 'usual suspects' have somehow been set aside as not relevant to the bouleversement taking place in the region. On the contrary, this paper argues that a return on civil society is necessary. It remains a relevant issue not because it can explain revolts or regime change - an assumption that informed the study of democratic transition in the past - but because it highlights the significant transformations that national states have been going under as a result of neo-liberal reforms, which have reached the Middle East since 1980s. Central to such transformations are the shrinking role of the state in the welfare sector and the rise of civil society as the provider of social services in neo-liberal economies. Dismissing civil society as non-relevant to the politics in the Middle East, mainly looking at it through the prism of regime change/democratization, means ignoring the fact that civil society actors are resilient and that they are institutionalising as a hub of power. In fact, civil society's self-representation, its foundational myths and its presence in the field of social policies have remained crucial to the functioning of nation-states. This paper builds on neo-institutionalism and Gidden's theory of structuration as frameworks of analysis, and examines the presence of civil society actors in Iran's governance system by focusing on the sector of children and women's protection. Through the analysis of self-representations and self-definitions, the emergence of inter-organisational structures of domination and patterns of coalition, increase in the information-load among organisations, and the development of awareness around a common enterprise, the paper contends that NGOs are growingly isomorphic and professionalised with significant consequences in terms of i) claims they can make to the state ii) internal employers-employees relations and iii) change in the mission of their assistance. A concluding section will reflect on the possibilities for comparative analysis.

The literature on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) frames them as hallmarks of a vibrant civil society and a liberalized regime. Scholars approach NGOs as key sites of collective empowerment where citizens come together to express interests and mobilize to promote change. In addition to cultivating tolerance, respect, and civic participation among their members, NGOs are believed to act as watchdogs over the state and vehicles through which citizens advance their policy interests. Fueled by Western aid, Palestine's NGO sector ballooned in recent decades. But instead of comprising organizations that represented Palestinians' interests and campaigned for Palestinians' rights and a freedoms, Palestine's NGO sector grew into a sector of professional, bureaucratic organizations that were upwardly accountable to donors rather than downwardly accountable to citizens. These organizations crowded out smaller groups engaged in citizen mobilization and implemented programs that ameliorated the effects of the Israeli occupation rather than fundamentally challenging it. Recently, however, grassroots groups and organizations have emerged to re-claim Palestinian civil society as a space of citizen empowerment and political resistance. Working outside of the international aid system, they are undertaking projects as diverse as sustainable agriculture, community empowerment through yoga and hiking, and the creation of "alternative" maps of East Jerusalem. They are invoking the concept of sumud (steadfastness) as they endeavor to build resistance economies, promote Palestinian solidarity, and end the Israeli occupation. Their work contests the exercise of productive power over the governance of Palestine by Western donors and seeks to return such power to local Palestinians. This paper examines how these grassroots groups understand the concept and roles of civil society and the strategies they deploy to cultivate a resistance-oriented civil space. Drawing upon data from ethnographic research, the paper will identify the landscape of these organizations which are rejecting international aid. It will then identify how their conceptualizations of civil society differ from those of more professionalized, aid-funded NGOs, by focusing on their stances toward resistance to Western governance. Finally, it will explore how seemingly benign activities such as yoga, hiking, and tourism can serve as political acts of resistance and citizen solidarity.

Based on fieldwork in Iran, this paper examines the civic associations of former revolutionary activists and war veterans. Analyzing these associations sheds light on the interconnection between and the paradoxes of factional politics and associational life in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), a semi-authoritarian or hybrid state with non-elective and elective institutions. While these associations claimed to be independent and apolitical, they comprised government-organized nongovernmental organizations (GONGOs) – a contradiction in terms – because they were established with the encouragement and support of political elites from different factions in an effort to gain popular legitimacy, political support, and electoral votes. This phenomenon corresponded with previous non-Tocquevillian notions of Middle Eastern civil society as an object of elite clientelism, cooptation, and corporatism through which social capital and interpersonal trust were leveraged to reinforce the authoritarian status quo rather than promote democratic change. Nevertheless, these associations also produced unintended consequences. Despite the attempts by political elites to mobilize and socialize voters and supporters through these associations, they were infiltrated, steered, and exploited by activists and veterans from opposing factions who did so by concealing their political, religious, and ideological orientations in the spirit of preference falsification. Like other organizations and institutions in the IRI, these associations were not immune to factional politics at the state level nor were they beholden to a single political faction despite elite efforts to the contrary. While using these associations to advance their political interests, political elites simultaneously empowered previously fragmented and marginalized activists and veterans by enabling them to organize a critical mass of constituents and aggregate popular claims from below. In a quid pro quo or bidirectional fashion, these associations became advocacy or interest groups and pressured the very state that they ostensibly assisted and supported into providing increased and improved public goods and social services. As such, these associations represented a seedbed for authentic and autonomous activism. At the same time, they benefitted the state by constituting a controlled feedback mechanism, relegating reform to the socioeconomic instead of the political, and confining contentious politics to the routine (e.g., lobbying and legislating) rather than the non-routine (e.g., strikes and sit-ins).

The Syrian war is widely perceived as a vicious battle between armed actors. Non-combatants are considered too, but usually as a refugee "problem." My project takes a closer look at the Syrian warscape and reveals the exercise of agency among nonviolent activists in the realms of civil society and governance, both inside the conflict state and in refuge in neighboring countries. These ordinary people act in extraordinary circumstances to deliver emergency relief to places inaccessible to external actors, institute alternative governance bodies, and create civil society organizations. Since the 2011 uprising, such civilian mobilization has evolved, notably varying in its extensiveness and contentiousness. I seek to understand both the persistence of civilian participation against the odds of violence and displacement, and the variation in its nature. My theory establishes a connection between activism and the assistance it receives. I forge a theory of aid's impacts that pays particular attention to the resources offered by external actors in an era of expansive humanitarianism and developmentalism, in comparison to the resources offered by local communities or armed actors. While local communities and armed actors have means and reasons for supporting civilian activism, that activism will remain limited, and vary in its contentiousness, for reasons I explain in the paper. External actors also support activists in rebel-held territory and in refugee host states. My theory contends that the more assistance these actors give, the more likely they are to activate processes that generate extensive, uncontentious activism. The processes I have identified are threefold: feeding, formalizing, and fragmenting. This paper focuses on the first, feeding, which captures aid's emergence and expansion in the warscape. Aid funding has increased enormously over time, as have its purposes, its actors, and the institutional arrangements it activates (de Waal 1997, Duffield 2001, Barnett and Weiss 2008b, Risse 2013). Humanitarianism has come to include everything from emergency relief to the transformation of civil society (Duffield 2001, Hoffman and Weiss 2006), sweeping in activism at every turn. In this process, we observe activists appealing for assistance, forming civil society organizations to attain it, and using it as leverage vis-à-vis other conflict actors. For evidence, I draw on fieldwork in Jordan and Turkey, where I conducted over 125 qualitative interviews with Syrians and foreign aid workers, and a unique survey of 176 Syrian activists in Amman, in addition to other primary and secondary sources.