Introduction

Over a decade since their arrival, Syrian refugees in Turkey remain under the Temporary Protection Regime (TPR) created by the state for Syrians;¹ their future there remains uncertain due to Turkey having added a geographical limitation to the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees, which means that it will only officially bestow refugee status to European migrants. As of 2021, there are approximately four million Syrian refugees in Turkey, living mostly in urban areas and, even though they have access to certain rights including health services and education, Syrians still experience major challenges such as anti-refugee discrimination, restrictions on their access to employment and feelings of insecurity in their neighbourhoods.

The Turkish government’s response to Syrian displacement has gone through various stages, beginning with an open-door policy from 2011 to 2014 and ending more recently with the threat of deportations, debating repatriation and limiting Syrians’ mobility within the country. Until 2015, Turkey sought temporary solutions by introducing new laws and decrees on refugees. In 2016, however, an EU-Turkey deal came into effect, limiting the mobility of Syrian refugees under temporary protection. Far from developing policies which would offer permanent solutions by making Syrian refugees’ status less ambiguous and protecting their rights (Can, 2019), the 2016 deal exacerbated uncertainty and insecurity for Syrians. Due to rapid changes in the Turkish political climate throughout this period, a similar pattern can be observed in the operations and the presence of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international NGOs (INGOs) in Turkey working in the humanitarian field with Syrian refugees. The Turkish government has approached NGOs with suspicion (Özdora-Akşak and Dimitrova, 2021) and the state became a major actor that manages the humanitarian space in Turkey by limiting international actors’ humanitarian work (Boztaş, 2019). Yet, unable to respond to the needs of the fast-growing refugee population, it has condoned the activities of NGOs and INGOs, mostly due to financial considerations (Mackreath and Sagnic, 2017) and has heavily relied on their livelihood and social integration agendas. This provided NGOs with easy access to Syrian refugees living in urban areas, which the government did not have much control over (Betts et al., 2020).

Although Turkey has introduced ‘integration’² as one of the main goals of its migration regime, including its asylum policies (Sunata and Tosun, 2019), ‘local’ forms of relatedness and state responses to refugees’ needs remain as unimplemented policy statements, which has made civil society organisations³ primary agents to conduct ‘livelihood’ projects and provide services such as employment and vocational courses for refugees. The role that NGOs play in the process of meeting refugees’ needs and establishing humanitarian aid in Turkey is significant considering the pressure that civil society has been under since the Turkish government has become more authoritarian (Danış and Nazlı, 2019), particularly after the attempted 2016 coup d’etat. However, as professionalised NGO work has become the normative way of providing aid in Turkey since 2011, solidarity networks with refugees and refugee-led initiatives in Turkey and particularly Southern Turkey have remained limited, which has further intensified the discourses and perceptions of refugees as victims.

It has been more than two decades since Malkki (1995) critiqued scholarly work on refugees – in particular, ethnographic studies and the label of refugee studies (for instance, see Black and Robinson, 1993; DeVoe, 1992) – that locates the problem not in the violence that refugees flee from (or in the violence they encounter when they arrive elsewhere), but in refugees themselves. She suggests that the impulse of locating problems within the figure of the refugee coincides with another tendency, that which universalises the refugee in the ‘refugee experience’. Despite scholarly and activist works avoiding ‘problem-based’ approaches to migration, refugees in Turkey are still positioned as a problem to be fixed and their experience is assumed to be singular, something that can be handled through humanitarian solutions and/or ‘integration’ policies (for instance, see Boyraz, 2015; Şimşek and Çorabatır, 2016). Framing refugees as the ‘objects’ of social ‘integration’ policies and humanitarian work not only reproduces unsustainable living conditions but also demonstrates the continuance of colonial power relations in the humanitarian field in the Global South. By engaging these structural and geopolitical asymmetries, recent studies on displacement in the Middle East address, inter alia, the complex issues in humanitarianism and show provider-recipient power relations (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto, 2015; Carpi, 2018; Carpi and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020a, 2020b); modalities of crisis management developed by actors from the Global South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2018, 2019; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto, 2015); the relationship between humanitarianism and activism among refugees (Khoury, 2017); and the politics of solidarity work among Syrian women (Dağtaş and Can, 2022). These studies utilise a decolonial perspective towards gender, displacement and humanitarianism in culturally nuanced ways by challenging the victimisation of refugee women. Building on this literature, this article contributes a comparative analysis of colonial/Northern influence⁴ in engaging with refugees through humanitarian ‘projects’ as opposed to local intimate encounters that seek to embody non-transient and localised solidarity-based forms of relatedness with refugees, particularly with refugee women.

This article argues that a project-based approach to humanitarian work – defined as refugee aid and livelihood programmes funded by Northern donors and agencies and which are predominantly conducted for short time periods of between six months to three years – creates unsustainable and temporary solutions resulting in what I call a ‘dependency cycle’ by reproducing global colonial trends in humanitarianism. This cycle goes beyond the common assertion on ‘refugees’ dependence on aid’ as invoked in migration-related research, and instead refers to a type of dependency created among local, national and international actors and Northern donors involved in refugee aid. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the humanitarian projects, which are run by NGO and INGO professionals to promote refugee employment, skill development and refugee women’s ‘empowerment’, often re-produce refugee women’s vulnerabilities, such as constituting them as ‘objects’ of humanitarian work rather than agents of their own lives, and as ‘victims’ who are not able to be or act independently. These humanitarian projects use ‘empowerment’ as a frame to engage donors’ rhetoric and position women within a development framework based on the (by now extensively critiqued) dominant capitalist approach to women’s ‘empowerment’ and ignore the complexity and diversity of women’s identities and experiences (Nasr, 2022).⁵ Lastly, the projects, which are rarely led by refugees, have been conducted with large amounts of funding that provide cash assistance (although limited both in terms of duration and amount of money) to refugees but fail to maintain refugees’ well-being in the long term, hindering the possibility of new venues for advocacy. Moreover, they marginalise (and cause further discrimination of) Syrian refugees and expose them to discriminatory practices by local Turkish citizens, who perceive humanitarian assistance as a privilege for refugees. Therefore, humanitarian projects, which are often seen as the only possible way of assisting refugees, depoliticise humanitarianism by presenting it as a sole form of economic development and prioritise knowledge producers in the Global North over ‘refugees as agents’. In this sense, this study is part of a broader ethnography focusing on the roles and impacts of national and international actors in humanitarian assistance and refugee-led responses to displacement, conducted in the southern Turkish city of Adana. In addition to my previous ethnographic fieldwork (since 2015) with Syrian refugees, since 2021 I have interacted with seven organisations and two municipalities and have conducted 30 in-depth interviews with NGO/INGO workers, Syrian refugee women and metropolitan municipal officials in Adana. By focusing on Syrian refugee women and humanitarian projects aiming at ‘empowering’ refugee women, I compare various humanitarian organisations and cooperatives that exemplify Western-oriented ‘professional’ perspectives towards refugees versus refugee-led organisations that emerge as alternative forms of relatedness and social and economic solidarity with refugees.⁶

Humanitarian projects mostly depict and identify refugee women as ‘vulnerable’ individuals who need the interventions of external actors in order to be ‘empowered,’ instead of recognising refugee women as active agents in their own right. Such rhetoric has been used and applied repeatedly to ensure a continuation of humanitarian support; this framing is similar to what Carpi and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2020b) have observed among faith leaders in Lebanon, in terms of how faith leaders navigate international demands to secure funding. The NGOs/INGOs that are the subjects of this research all operate in multiple cities across Turkey; however, I specifically focus on their provision of services and projects run for Syrian refugee women in Adana. The second part of this article focuses on a local organisation – the Meryem Women’s Cooperative, a centre operating with the support of Adana Metropolitan Municipality, which is a unique example of sustainable refugee-women-led (livelihood) organisations – to demonstrate how local refugee-led responses (in this case run by Syrian women) can offer a new avenue in understanding refugees’ active involvement in humanitarian and solidarity networks.

The first part of the article thus delineates how humanitarian organisations operate and how their projects reproduce the coloniality of humanitarian approaches and the ‘dependency cycle’, exacerbated by the Turkish government’s refugee policies, while the second part reveals the possibilities of alternative forms of ‘relatedness’ and economic production among refugee women, as well as solidarity through refugee-led responses emerging in the context of displacement in Turkey.

Refugees as Projects: The Problem of Sustainability and Refugee Involvement in Humanitarian Work

The rise of NGO-business in the Middle East and Turkey following the displacement of Syrian refugees post-2011 raised debates over the nature and impacts of humanitarian assistance and the effective management of refugees’ needs and problems. Scholarly research on the role of civil society put forth the strengths and weaknesses of NGOs and civil society-government relations (Boztaş, 2019). Recent studies have argued that humanitarianism cannot be understood as an ‘absolute value’ (Stavinoha and Ramakrishnan, 2020) and others have approached humanitarianism from a political economy perspective and through the lens of racialised capitalism (Bird and Schmid, 2021) by highlighting the precarity it reproduces. Others have explored the relationship between social integration, the politics of NGOs and civil society (Campbell and Tobin, 2016; Kutlu, 2015; Sunata and Tosun, 2019), and the needs of and humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees (Cankurtaran and Albayrak, 2019; Öztürk et al., 2019), mostly describing NGO operations in comparison to government-regulated aid and policies in Turkey.

Reduced in this context to government-regulated ‘humanitarian assistance and charitable activities’ (Danış and Nazlı, 2019: 145, cited in Dağtaş and Can, 2022: 266), humanitarian aid and solidarity with Syrians represent a contested field and, with an authoritarian turn in Turkish politics, civil society organisations came to operate in a restricted field (Aras and Duman, 2019). While the Turkish government indulges ‘faith-based humanitarianism’ in Turkey (Danış and Nazlı, 2019), refugees’ involvement in civil society has been limited. In a similar vein, social scientific research in Turkey has paid attention to the ways in which non-state actors and particularly NGOs fill the gaps left or created by the nation-state (Aras and Duman, 2019; Sözer, 2021). In parallel to the global trend of humanitarianism rolled out through a neoliberal model of governance,⁷ NGOs in Turkey operate to fill the gap in the social and economic rights of the underprivileged that the central government fails to provide. The lack of internal resources to assist large numbers of refugees in Turkey creates a necessity for more international funding to provide basic needs such as education, food and protection (Özgür-Keysan and Şentürk, 2021; Sunata and Tosun, 2019: 687). However, the Turkish government has approached NGOs, especially international actors, with suspicion by controlling the humanitarian space. In addition, the government, as the only central authority over INGOs, has utilised its national legislation and surveillance mechanisms to limit INGO operations. The Turkish state regulates NGO operations through the Turkish Civil Code (1926), and Law No. 5253 on Associations positions the Ministry of Interior as the main entity authorised to accept or reject the registration of international NGOs in Turkish territory (Boztas, 2019). Therefore, Turkey’s management of humanitarian affairs in relation to refugees has been contradictory at times: it relies on NGOs/INGOs to promote ‘social cohesion’ and balance disparities in terms of employment while simultaneously dominating NGO operations and scrutinising their activities by suppressing rights-based voices. This positions NGOs as implementers of projects rather than as participants enabling the long-term sustainable well-being of refugees and developing meaningful policy-making processes.

Despite the proliferation of academic studies on refugee-related NGOs and humanitarianism in Turkey, the inner workings of these institutions and the impact of the current humanitarian order on Syrian refugees have scarcely been examined. As migration scholars highlight the deficiencies and problems of humanitarian logic in Europe (Rozakou, 2016; Siapera, 2019), the intricacy and ambiguity of humanitarian spaces in Turkey and in the Middle East means that closer attention to decolonial forms of refugee aid and refugee-led organisations is required. As I have discussed elsewhere in my research with Seçil Dağtaş, the politics of solidarity in Turkey operates under the shadow of humanitarian aid-based approaches and structural limitations due to the rise of an authoritarian government (Dağtaş and Can, 2022). In addition, solidarity with Syrian refugee women stops because of incompatibilities in understanding solidarity work along the Turkish borderlands among Turkish citizens or – in this case – feminist groups in Antakya (Dağtaş and Can, 2022). Although scholars have been also critical of the order and the logic of humanitarian aid in the Middle East due to its colonial, Western-centric and neoliberal business-like nature (see, for instance, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto, 2015; Carpi, 2021b; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Fiori, 2020), the effects of the ‘project-based’ approach to Syrian refugees living in urban areas in Turkey have yet to be analysed. Against this backdrop, my ethnographic findings indicate that the humanitarian projects implemented by NGOs/INGOs bring about a new form of colonial reproduction of aid and relief.

Building on the literature critiquing humanitarian assistance by calling out its limitations, the following section demonstrates the stakes of assisting refugees through a colonial gaze (Mignolo, 2000), which reduces them to ‘projects’ of the global North and highlights the consequences of a project-oriented approach to humanitarian work in the context of displacement.

Dependency Cycle: Reproducing Dependency through Humanitarian Projects

The international humanitarian regime relies on the notion of co-dependency to explain the relationship between humanitarianism and refugees (Barnett, 2014), where managing and mitigating the suffering of refugees have been accompanied by humanitarian efforts. This management is often predicated on the assumption that refugees are inherently dependent on externally provided aid and that humanitarian actors undertake an important task of ‘helping those in need’. However, scholarly work such as Harrell-Bond’s (1986) ethnographic research with Ugandan refugees in Sudan has shown how the deployment of aid through competing international organisations has failed to meet humanitarian goals and indeed made things even worse through ignoring, and at times undermining, local knowledge and existing infrastructure. Going beyond the co-dependency of humanitarian workers and refugees and/or a critique of the impact of NGOs on refugees, my ethnographic work indicates a ‘dependency cycle’, through which local andnational organisations are made to be dependent on international actors and donors. The maintenance of such co-dependency is sustained by creating more dependency through project-based interventions and by constituting refugees as aid-project-dependent and passive recipients of aid rather than as active agents. With large numbers of refugees living in the area, Adana hosts a range of NGOs/INGOs, which conduct livelihood and ‘integration’ projects through international funding. Since this ethnographic research is mainly based on an analysis of projects involving refugee women, one of the most prominent official aspects and aims of these projects has been the goal of ‘empowerment’. Such an approach depicts women as powerless prior to external intervention and constitutes them as passive subjects of humanitarian aid. However, inter alia, feminist researchers have long pointed out that a focus on individual ‘empowerment’ risks perpetuating the depoliticisation of women’s structural marginalisation and exclusion (Nasr, 2022).

My research site, Adana, has been one of the main centres of NGO/INGO presence in southern Turkey since 2011. After a number of INGOs ceased their operations due to their registrations being rescinded by the Turkish government in 2017,⁸ the remaining INGOs became more permanent in their operations and physical presence. In Adana, the Directorate-General for Migration Management (DGMM) has been the main actor supervising coordination with NGOs, and INGOs are required to have local partners in order to be able to continue their programmes and projects. As one of the biggest metropolitan cities and the fifth most populous city in Turkey, and situated 100 km from the Syrian border, Adana has a population of almost 3 million, with 40 per cent of the population residing in Seyhan, one of the central districts of the Adana province. According to official statistics, the Syrian population in Adana is 255,264, which places it sixth in terms of the location with the largest number of Syrian refugees after Istanbul, Hatay, Gaziantep, Sanliurfa and Mardin (Akçalı, 2022: 6). Most Syrian refugees find employment as wage workers, or more precisely as seasonal labourers (mevsimlik isci), due to Adana’s extensive agricultural lands which produce cotton, vegetables and fruits. These workers live in unsafe and impoverished tents during the season. Other than seasonal labour and construction work, Syrian refugees have limited options to find employment and access accommodation. Adana has a history of being a city of destination for internally displaced peoples – mostly Kurdish – in the 1990s. The province is also home to Arab citizens of Turkey residing mostly in coastal areas and villages of the province.

The diversity of the province’s ethnic and religious composition does not necessarily create amicable relations among the local residents of Adana with Syrian refugees. However, Adana metropolitan municipality and local governing actors have been actively involved in refugee management and voluntary efforts to promote ‘integration’ as a goal, as opposed to many Turkish cities and their governors which have been openly discriminating against refugees. The municipality, whose mayor won the Office in 2019 and is from the opposition CHP (Republican People’s Party) has also worked closely with international NGOs and funding agencies to implement projects to promote refugee employment. Like other major Turkish metropolitan cities, Adana hosts several NGOs/INGOs engaged in refugee-related issues, such as Support to Life (Hayata Destek), SGDD-ASAM (Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants), Care International and GOAL International, as well as UN agencies including the International Organization for Migration (IOM). In addition, development and funding agencies such as the World Bank have played a major role in supporting humanitarian projects in the field of migration. The multiplicity of actors operating in Adana has made the field of humanitarian and refugee-related projects highly complex. In order to learn about humanitarian responses to displacement in Adana and assess durable solutions to refugees’ problems within this local context, I conducted interviews with major actors among these diverse NGOs/INGOs, alongside my ethnographic research with displaced people themselves. One of the questions pursued in this research was to understand refugees’ involvement in finding solutions to their own issues and their active participation in socio-political landscapes.

As Sunata and Tosun put forward in their study on refugee-related NGOs, humanitarian work revolves around a typology which provides services in relief aid, education and psycho-social support (Sunata and Tosun, 2019: 689). The NGOs’ fields of activity in Adana follow a similar pattern to aid providers in other regions of the country, comprising legal and education services, community centres and vocational courses and delivering cash assistance.⁹ However, Adana has a distinctive feature given its emphasis on collaborative work among different actors, which usually involves municipalities, local NGOs, development agencies and INGOs. As such, during my fieldwork I delved into such collaborative projects where ‘local’ forms of engagement and the presence of ‘local’ people were emphasised and advertised.

Çağla’s reproachment about ‘not being able to make a difference’ stems from an issue that is twofold. First, there is the fact that humanitarian organisations maintain a system which reduces refugees to ‘target numbers’ and second, the Turkish government’s policies restrict and ‘suppress’ NGO operations in Turkey, which became much more visible after the failed coup attempt in 2016 (Boztaş, 2019: 159). Maintaining target numbers aims to respond to donors’ requests rather than responding to refugees’ needs. The humanitarian logic in the field of migration irrefutably reproduces and represents a colonial approach, one that excludes the ‘human’ in humanitarian work through submitting to neoliberal forms of business. Postcolonial studies of the agents of knowledge (Slater, 2004) and humanitarian actions have long invited us to interrogate the emancipatory aims of humanitarianism (Palladino and Woolley, 2018). However, reformulations of the way humanitarian organisations work (in other words, a change in ‘the way things are done’ in the NGO sector), have nonetheless maintained, rather than challenged, dominant systems and structures. The effects of such structural problems were repeatedly identified and denounced by my interlocutors. The second issue relates to NGO workers’ fear of the Turkish government’s arbitrary practices of cracking down on NGOs, and concerns relating to structural problems in the country regarding migration management. The lack of competency in governmental organisations and discrimination against NGOs which do not openly support the current Turkish government make certain NGOs step back in their efforts to engage in refugee-based operations at multiple levels.

What Pınar points out here reveals the dependency of humanitarian workers on the continuation of projects for their own employment and livelihoods. Therefore, the professionalisation of NGO workers, which means participating in Northern donors’ rhetoric and writing ‘acceptable’ projects, increases profit and secures another project; thus, refugees become ‘beneficiaries’ of another project in turn.

What Furkan highlights regarding refugee employment is that it perpetuates needs and fails to offer any durable solutions to refugee unemployment. This failure corresponds with the Turkish state’s failure to provide equal employment opportunities for Syrian refugees by rendering them as providers of ‘cheap labour’ within Turkey’s informal economy. More than a decade after their arrival, Syrian refugees are still under Temporary Protection Status. Although Syrian refugees can participate in the labour market, their access to employment has been limited mainly because it still requires employers to apply for a work permit to employ them. Such restrictions in employment make Syrian refugees depend on humanitarian projects, which essentially stems from the failure of migration management in Turkey. As previously highlighted, the Turkish government accepted Syrian refugees without long-term plans to protect their rights and/or provide equal rights, as a result of which, policies regarding Syrian refugees still only offer temporary solutions. Additionally, in the quote above, Furkan implies that international funding itself does not intend to offer long-term solutions and instead creates diverse ‘vulnerabilities’ both for NGO workers and for refugee women. What Furkan highlights resembles Drif’s observations with regards to refugee-volunteers in Lebanon, who are rendered invisible due to job insecurity produced by the manner in which the professional world of international aid has been organised and the status of refugees in contexts where refugees are prohibited from working (Drif, 2018: 22). In a similar vein, these ‘invisible careers’ (Drif, 2018: 38), and/or ‘vulnerabilities’ in the Turkish context as Furkan suggests, are perpetuated further by the Turkish government’s ambiguous migration policies such as the lack of clarity on determining Syrian refugees’ future in Turkey. The failure to provide equal social, cultural and economic rights for Syrian refugees and the climate of fear experienced by humanitarian workers and human rights advocates in Turkey reproduce precarity. As Carpi (2018, 2021b) also emphasises, in the context of Akkar (Lebanon), aid work positions within the local economy of labour are typically short-term and unsteady. Thus, humanitarian workers often operate under precarious conditions, aiming to avoid conflicts with state institutions while also relying on donor satisfaction with project outcomes to maintain their employment. As our interviewee Furkan suggests, after the project ends it is not only refugees but also project workers who lose their source of income, unless they begin another project.

What Furkan describes is the exact depiction of the colonial order of the global humanitarian regime that reproduces Southern dependency on the mercy of Northern donors and ‘charity’. As Furkan’s poignant description clearly demonstrates, these humanitarian projects fail to provide sustainable employment and decent living conditions for refugees; nonetheless, they are successful in perpetuating the cycle of dependency, which respectively implicates that more funding and interventions are needed to achieve success. As James Ferguson (1994) famously exposed in his work on Lesotho, the discourse of ‘development’ turns questions of poverty that are about power structures into technical problems that can be solved through apolitical aid-based interventions. However, the acknowledgment that these projects are complicit in concealing poverty –particularly in the case of refugee women– and that national and local actors navigate the ‘international development apparatus’ (Ferguson, 1994) to secure their own position and benefits, situates the dependency cycle as a microcosm of the perils of the humanitarian regimes run by Northern epistemologies.

Moreover, these humanitarian projects follow a pattern of incorporating local actors or the trend of the ‘localisation of aid’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015) by finding local partners. As Fiddian-Qasmiyeh argues, the approach of incorporating local/national/regional actors in the South – what she refers to as their ‘instrumentalisation’ – suggests mobilising Southern actors to ‘keep the burden’ in the South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2015). I would further argue that the project-oriented approach to assistance and protection services not only contradicts local needs but also produces new forms of vulnerabilities by obstructing the possibility of intimate encounters and culturally meaningful alliances between local residents and refugees themselves.

The politics of localisation in the humanitarian paradigm has been futile as displaced people have the least power in managing the ‘crisis’ of displacement. During my interviews with multiple NGO/INGO workers in administrative positions, I asked about the position of refugees in their livelihood and ‘social integration’ projects. The implication of humanitarian projects is that refugees are neither acknowledged nor engaged as agents of knowledge, nor are they voices of conduct and/or analysis. In an interview with Zeynep, working as a project coordinator at an INGO in Adana, she clearly states the way in which the colonial order is sustained in humanitarian projects. She emphasises that there are certain imperatives that NGO professionals adhere to, while disregarding localised knowledge and refugees’ own articulations regarding their own needs and constraints.

Refugees do not take part in any stage of the projects conducted by the INGOs. The white men write those projects and white men fund those projects. We implement whatever is told. The problem is even though you try to write up a project that would directly speak to refugee needs in the field, they ask you to revise it. So it is their [donors’] call at the end of the day. (Zeynep, 32, INGO project coordinator)

Upholding colonial values, the humanitarian regime creates its own forms of dependency and ambiguity both for refugees and local residents. These projects seemingly serve regional and local issues with a set of goals, including generating employment both for refugees and locals and developing the region by considering local dynamics (sectors such as agriculture, textile and impoverished neighbourhoods, etc.). Nonetheless, these projects, which are often accepted and funded on the premise of ‘localised knowledge’ and regional collaborations, do not go beyond what Murrey and Jackson (2020) call ‘localwashing’ in that international agencies ‘local wash’ development projects by bringing in local people and by using images of local people, when in fact the same process and the same actions are in play.

Asma and Rada both emphasise the temporary nature of NGO/INGO projects and cash assistance. Although humanitarian organisations develop programmes for skill development and employment, they neither provide sustainable livelihoods nor enable employment. What Rada shares about ‘needing something permanent’ pertains to the uncertainty of Syrian refugees’ future in Turkey. Along with the anti-refugee animosity that refugees in Turkey face daily, aid-based approaches to displacement further deepen the gap between local citizens and refugees both in social and economic spaces. The problem of humanitarian projects vis-à-vis Syrian refugee women is not only about the sustainability of projects but also about recognising Syrian refugees as ‘permanent’ residents of Turkey and responding to their situated needs rather than the needs and expectations of Northern actors. Without a doubt, NGOs/INGOs cannot change the political and socio-economic structures of inequality and coloniality on a global scale. However, NGO projects represent the vision of the Global North to maintain structured North-South dependencies and power relations. As clearly seen in NGO and INGO coordinators’ statements, programmes designed to build a ‘sustainable living environment’ for refugees, including improvement projects in housing, livelihood and ‘integration’, reproduce asymmetrical power structures through ‘cycles of dependencies’ among humanitarian actors at micro, mezzo and macro levels. This cycle is paradoxically both the end product and the main source of failure and obstruction in offering durable solutions that indeed take refugee needs into account rather than rely on ready-to-use schemes of humanitarian projects and Northern (donor) desires. In essence, the professional business of refugee-related humanitarian work has established a set of techniques and practices through which the generation, diffusion and validation of knowledge are organised and managed (Escobar, 1988).

Refugee-Led Responses in Adana: Meryem Women’s Cooperative

As noted above, the situation of refugee women is commonly depoliticised, with representations of women persistently revolving around the image of the ‘victimised’ refugee subject, and with responses to displacement continuing to reproduce the assumption that Northern actors have the knowledge to decide the best type of support for refugees on behalf of refugees. In an effort to analyse humanitarian attempts to create alternative forms of solidarity and sustainable forms of local economic production that go beyond the ‘project-based approach’, an organisation came forward during my fieldwork: Meryem Women’s Cooperative. The cooperative is a formal organisation founded and jointly run by refugee and local women in Adana. This organisation does not necessarily offer comprehensive forms of solidarity or politically charged responses to displaced women; nonetheless, it invites us to rethink alternative spaces where decolonial and horizontal models of engagement and allyship with displaced populations are articulated and practiced. It does not necessarily deploy a politicised language and/or remain in a singular rights-based rhetoric. However, the recognition of such approaches to social and economic togetherness can lead to self-sustaining forms of survival and situates refugee women as active agents in the context of Southern responses to displacement.

The Meryem Women’s Cooperative (MWC) was founded in Adana in July 2020 by a diverse group of women including Syrian, Afghan and Iranian refugee women, LGBTQ women and women with disabilities. The cooperative was founded on the principles of Solidarity, Equality and Production by Turkish, Syrian, Iranian and Afghan women with the support of the International Labour Organization (ILO) Office for Turkey, in partnership with Adana Metropolitan Municipality. Its objective is to create job opportunities for women in various areas of production, and seeks to ‘empower women’ as part of its official aim. To achieve this goal, 37 participants from various backgrounds (including 9 Turkish citizens) came together to form a long-term socio-economic development plan, with the support of Adana Metropolitan Municipality. Although the ILO is one of the MWC’s funders, it has not been the deciding party on the cooperative’s internal issues or workings. Instead, the cooperative as an establishment targeting a non-hierarchical model of organisation, based on the idea of collaborative production and economic sustainability, has its roots in local actors’ engagement with refugee women. The mayor of Adana Metropolitan Municipality has been a prominent actor collaborating with migration scholars, multiple local feminist organisations and refugee-related NGOs. Despite the over-politicisation of Syrian migration in Turkish domestic politics, this metropolitan municipality has played an active role in supporting projects focusing on the employment of refugee women in Adana.

The MWC implements an ‘Access to Livelihoods Project’ and has six ateliers through which they produce surgical masks, face shields and textile products. In addition, they cultivate seasonal vegetables and fruit on 58 acres of land in Adana and use greenhouse technologies to dry fruits (all of the implementations are carried out with recycled energy usage). The rest of the field is used for other needs such as child day-care units and social activities for women. The cooperative sells all of the products to corporate grocery chains. The land and the buildings used by the cooperative are all subsidised through Adana Metropolitan Municipality.

The MWC is an emerging model of solidarity, which represents a unique mode of response to displacement in Southern Turkey. While the MWC and its economic production process is embedded in capitalistic forms of production and labour processes, it simultaneously indexes independent forms of socio-economic production for refugee and local women.

On one hand, the sense of community and intimacy extends beyond the dominant form of distant relatedness and therefore such community reveals itself as a humble attempt to decolonial options in responses to displacement. On the other hand, the MWC attends to capitalistic options and vernacularised conceptions of women’s ‘empowerment’ and development (Dağtaş and Can 2022: 273) and adheres to economic production from a developmentalist perspective.¹⁰ Indeed, as Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2018) argues, Southern and Northern-led responses to displacement evolve in a mutually constitutive way rather than in isolation from each other. The MWC uses neoliberal market-based tendencies to create a space for refugee women, where their work, labour and community are acknowledged. This market-oriented production and labour does not necessarily exclude developmental discourses, an integral part of which is self-reliance within the existing power structures. However, for my interlocutors, making their own economic choices and thriving in the absence of ‘project-based supervision or surveillance’ means resisting the cycle of dependency, which constitutes refugee women as passive recipients of aid. In this regard, the MWC offers a home where they can determine their own social and political subjectivities and establish intimate encounters with the women from diverse backgrounds. Such an approach refutes project-based perspectives that end at a certain point in time and produces more dependent subjects afterwards.

In order to understand what made the MWC different from other funded projects, first, it is notable that it is has been developed and implemented with the support of the local government and its initiative and expertise. The local government, Adana Metropolitan Municipality, is managed by the opposition party, the CHP, and as the founding partner of the MWC, it provides funding, fields (land) for the project and helps with refugee employment processes. The municipality and the refugee women who, together, run the cooperative have full agency over the MWC as an organisation. The involvement and supervision of the municipality has an important role in providing a ‘shield’ against the government’s oppressive approach towards an organisation such as the MWC. Despite local power struggles and tensions between Adana Metropolitan Municipality and DGMM, the government agencies have operated in a way that is consistent with the municipality’s pro-refugee policies. This has mostly been due to the strong and sustainable work that refugee women have put forth and ILO’s support for the central role that the local government has played. The second important difference between the MWC and other project-based humanitarian approaches is its underpinning principles and its solidarity-based structure. In the case of the MWC, the source of funding is still from the global North (as discussed above); however, the principles that they adhere to create a meaningful difference. The foundation of the MWC follows the principles of the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) as outlined by the UN Economist Network and the ILO,¹¹ and yet the principles of Solidarity, Equality and Production are advocated and embodied by the MWC’s women partners themselves, rather than merely being an externally imposed framework. As such, although these principles remain within the discourse of ‘development’, in the case of the MWC these principles have helped foster a relatively sustainable and agent-centred solidarity economy.

In her work on provider-recipient relations in Lebanon, Carpi (2018) demonstrates how aid provider-recipient power relations form a homogenous arm of governance and hinder solidarity and empathy with displaced people. Humanitarian work generated in the Global North and applied in the context of Turkey by international and national actors create a similar form of governance and fail to provide a platform for the negotiation of solidarity and refugee involvement. Such tailored projects that reduce refugees to ‘beneficiaries’ of aid not only strip refugees of their agency but also obstruct care and intimacy for and among the displaced to build a sense of living together. In this sense, the MWC, encourages refugee-led humanitarian work in their effort to engage women in culturally meaningful ways, which also challenge power structures and hierarchies embedded in the humanitarian order.

Emergent forms of social and economic solidarity, as seen in the example of Adana, contest humanitarian work which depoliticises Syrian women and suggest that there is space for collaboration without failing to acknowledge refugee women as political subjects with their own histories, struggles and multifaceted ties in their countries of origin. As opposed to healing processes and community building, short-term humanitarian projects reduce refugee women to passive objects of the ‘projects to be accomplished’ and not subjects of their own lives and architects of advocacy. It then begs the question ‘how will Syrian women become part of the civil society in Turkey when they are not visible as subjects in civil society organisations?’ In response to this question, refugee-led organisations, in this case Meryem Women’s Cooperative, might present a refugee-led, non-hegemonic and agent-centred example.

Conclusion

As Syrian displacement remains one of the most debated and politicised issues in Turkey, it is now more important than ever to critically engage with the role of civil society in establishing solidarity with migrants and to interrogate alternative modes of responses to displacement and refugee needs. Addressing coloniality requires disclosing how knowledge producers in the global North (Carpi and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020a, 2020b) impose their own categorisations and ‘humanitarian projects’ onto local actors and displaced people in the global South. The labour involved in refugee women’s efforts to assert their own agency in building their own lives and livelihoods goes beyond the ‘ideals of integration’ that reproduce social and political hierarchies. In this vein, the refugee-led organisation in Adana that I have discussed in this article pushes us to recognise subtle and alternative modalities that challenge Northern conceptualisations of humanitarian work and economic production and demonstrate that refugees might prioritise advocacy or community-building.

The goal of this research is not to defend advocacy and/or social solidarity for the sake of criticising the humanitarian work and assistance that refugee-related NGOs/INGOs provide in Turkey. However, the ways in which NGO/INGO actors respond to displacement and Syrian refugees’ needs fall into the loop of sustaining poverty, isolation and vulnerability, which is conceptualised as ‘cycle of dependencies’ in this research, rather than contributing to long-term relatedness and togetherness between and among refugees and Turkish citizens. It is important to be mindful of the fact that the Turkish government’s crackdown on NGOs limits the humanitarian space by favouring pro-government affiliations over others (Boztaş 2019); equally, the Turkish government’s management of NGO operations and its authoritarian approaches also restrict critical voices among civil society groups. These systems have tangible impacts on responses to displacement developed and implemented in Turkey. However, as discussed in this article, projects such as livelihood projects create and reproduce multiple cycles of dependency, which make project-based approaches dominant forms of responses to displacement and undermine local and refugee-led cooperatives and networks which can be recognised as horizontal and preferable forms of Southern cooperation. As my interlocutors have often highlighted, this dependency has become a norm of ‘doing business’ in humanitarian work, in which local organisations depend on national organisations, national ones depend on international organisations and international organisations depend on international donors in the global North. Such profit-centred and capitalistic approaches to humanitarianism do not bring about change, because the structure of humanitarian work itself does not aim for a change.

Neoliberal policies and project-based practices in the field will continue to reproduce dependency, and a humanitarian regime that maintains a colonial system will only prolong suffering in the global South. The economic and neoliberal model of ‘meeting beneficiaries’ needs’, as governed by Northern actors in the international humanitarian community, ignores not only the knowledge produced by and among refugee women in Turkey but also avoids a holistic perspective of a human being whose needs might also include social interaction, the desire to protect her family members’ safety and/or taking the time to feel emotionally stable. In contrast, cultivating solidarity and intimacy is about a mutual dialogue that goes beyond stating the obvious. People who have been displaced come with their own stories and histories and with their own ideas of ‘living together’ and of solidarity. The example of the MWC, a cooperative response developed by, with and for women, illustrates how local engagements and collaborations can embody solidarity and provide insights into non-hierarchical and sustainable solutions within the context of displacement.