This review evaluates two books on faith-based organizations (FBOs) and their role in welfare governance in Turkey.
Religious philanthropy has historically been a common institution across various cultures, geographies, and religious traditions. Despite differences in doctrine and practice, FBOs worldwide have consistently contributed to the politics of welfare provision, grounded in moral and religious duties. While some modern states have sought to limit welfare provision to secular institutions, many, including Germany and Turkey, have increasingly incorporated religious organizations into their welfare frameworks to address contemporary challenges, such as rising poverty and social exclusion.
This broader entanglement of religion and welfare provision has become particularly salient in the Turkish context, where the intersections of neoliberal restructuring, political Islam, and expanding faith-based service delivery have reshaped the landscape of social policy in the last three decades. The liberalization of the economy and politics after the 1980s resulted in increasing demand for social provision, where the proliferation of FBOs took place along with the expansion of social assistance by central and local governments. These developments coincided with the rise of Political Islam, particularly under the Justice and Development Party (AKP, as the Turkish acronym goes), making Turkey a compelling case through which to examine the evolving role of FBOs in welfare provision in a complex and ideologically charged landscape.
Gizem Zencirci’s The Muslim Social and Hilal Alkan’s Welfare as Gift books offer a timely and crucial perspective on the domestic underpinnings of social policy in Turkey, where we witness a rapid rise in the number and scale of FBOs in welfare provision under the AKP era. A shared concern across the two studies is how these organizations function in specific local settings and how they (re)configure social policy on the ground. While religious philanthropy has long played a role in Turkish welfare provision, these books demonstrate how its forms, ideological foundations, and political implications have significantly evolved under AKP rule. Given the common concern between the two books, I have decided to co-review them, a somewhat unusual undertaking, perhaps.
Alkan’s Welfare as Gift is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2008 and 2009 in the central Anatolian city of Kayseri. Focusing on the practices of FBOs, the study offers an in-depth account of the embodied and affective encounters between aid providers (often women volunteers) and beneficiaries, and it sheds light on the material and immaterial flows within these organizations and social groups. Alkan uses the theoretical framework of gift exchange to conceptualize welfare provision as a form of institutionalized gift-giving, where moral vocabularies and social relations facilitate the circulation of resources (p. 63). Her work emphasizes the multifaceted nature of gifts, which range from money and material aid to gestures of care, prayer, and even emotional support, illustrating the moral economy that underpins these interactions. Actually, Alkan’s ethnographic findings (such as the lack of oversight, the arbitrary distribution of aid, and the visible links to the ruling party) point to forms of politicized conditionality that sit uneasily within the language of reciprocity and voluntarism that “gift” implies. This raises questions about the appropriateness of gift theory in contexts of systemic political instrumentalization of welfare.
The analysis highlights the complex dynamics within FBOs and shows how these organizations are embedded in broader political and social relationships. For instance, the author notes instances where FBOs are physically and symbolically linked to the ruling party, such as the washing of the curtains of the governing party at FBO premises and the presence of AKP representatives within these organizations (p. 13). Furthermore, the analysis shows that needs assessment and social provision are arbitrary and subjective, based on an asymmetrical relationship between FBOs and receivers, lacking any external monitoring mechanism at both the organization and state levels. Alkan’s focus remains largely on the local level, with some limited discussion of how these practices are situated within national-level political dynamics.
Zencirci’s The Muslim Social foregrounds the politics of poverty governance and the entanglement of religion and neoliberalism in Turkey. Drawing on multiple rounds of fieldwork (conducted between 2009 and 2019 in Ankara, İstanbul, İzmir, and Gaziantep), and seventy-two in-depth interviews with civil servants, bureaucrats, non-governmental organization (NGO) workers, donors, and volunteers, the book offers a historically informed and politically engaged analysis. Tracing the evolution of social policy from the Ottoman era to the contemporary AKP period, Zencirci situates her analysis within the framework of “Islamic neoliberalism.” She conceptualizes the “Muslim Social” as a governmental assemblage that seeks to manage poverty through technical solutions and affective attachments, guided by Islamic moralities. This assemblage operates through both affective and technical means. On the one hand, it mobilizes religious idioms of compassion and solidarity. On the other hand, it deploys bureaucratic tools such as surveillance, categorization, and eligibility assessment to manage the poor. In doing so, it generates moralized citizens who are simultaneously recipients of social policy and subjects of discipline.
Zencirci’s book details the transformation of Islamic charity networks from the 1990s, when these groups were initially encouraged by the AKP to formalize as NGOs, into key players in the state’s poverty governance apparatus. With state support through tax relief, technical assistance, and diplomatic backing for both domestic and international operations, these FBOs became integral to the AKP’s political and social projects (pp. 54–58). Central to this analysis is the merging of Islamic values with managerial rationalities, such as the introduction of new surveillance mechanisms to monitor aid recipients, which have reshaped the landscape of social service provision in Turkey (p. 96). Drawing on a wealth of historical institutional data, Zencirci demonstrates how the increasing prominence of FBOs has not only redefined welfare practices but also served to bolster the AKP’s political authority, shifting focus away from the underlying social issues, like poverty, and towards a technocratic form of governance.
A central distinction between the two books lies in how they conceptualize FBOs and their relation to the state. Zencirci frames FBOs as integral to the AKP’s project of Islamic neoliberal governance – tools through which the state reconfigures the moral economy and governs poverty via religiously coded forms of affect and discipline. These organizations, while nominally civil society actors, are shown to function within patronage networks and broader strategies of political legitimation. Alkan, in contrast, foregrounds the relational and affective dynamics of welfare at the micro level. Her ethnography presents FBOs not as extensions of the state, but as morally embedded spaces where gendered actors negotiate obligation, care, and social reproduction. In doing so, she recasts welfare as a deeply social and moral practice, rather than an administrative or political one. However, her framing risks downplaying the extent to which these intimate spaces are shaped by, or even co-opted into, broader regimes of governance. Conversely, while Zencirci’s macro-political lens offers a compelling account of state strategy, it engages less directly with the lived, everyday experiences and moral negotiations that Alkan brings into view.
The disciplinary and methodological orientations of the two works further explain their divergent analytical emphases. Zencirci draws primarily on political sociology and policy analysis, combining archival research, elite interviews, and multi-sited fieldwork to trace the institutional and ideological transformations of welfare in Turkey. Alkan, by contrast, brings close engagement with everyday interactions between volunteers and beneficiaries, allowing for an exploration of gendered labour, care, and reciprocity. These methodological choices shape what each book makes visible: Alkan reveals the affective texture and moral ambiguities of giving, while Zencirci elucidates the political rationalities and institutional configurations that organize it.
The scalar differences between the books reflect their methodological approaches but make it more valuable to read them together and comparatively. Zencirci focuses on institutions and state-driven welfare provision, emphasizing the AKP’s political strategies at the national level. In contrast, Alkan’s ethnographic work zooms in on the micro-politics of care, highlighting gendered dimensions of welfare within religiously motivated organizations. Alkan’s focus on micro-level interactions allows her to explore the relational aspects of welfare that are often overlooked in more structural analyses, though it risks underestimating the broader political forces that shape these dynamics.
Both books, despite their differing approaches, offer valuable insights into the role of FBOs in a changing landscape of welfare provision. Through meticulous fieldwork and historical analysis, they demonstrate how FBOs have increasingly become integrated into state welfare systems under the AKP’s rule. The findings shed light on how the state’s redirection of resources towards “government friendly” FBOs legitimizes a non-transparent and unregulated mixing of public and private welfare efforts, with significant political implications. Ultimately, these works contribute to our understanding of the intersections between religion, politics, and social policy, yet also underscore the need for ongoing research into the evolving dynamics of welfare provision in an increasingly authoritarian context and deepened poverty.
The shift of welfare provision from centralized state institutions to FBOs carries crucial political and social implications. While often framed as a response to bureaucratic inefficiency or cultural proximity, this outsourcing erodes principles of accountability, transparency, and universalism that should/could strengthen social policy and citizenship with a rights-based approach. It creates fragmented systems that are unevenly distributed to citizens, ideologically filtered, and subject to opaque discretionary authority. The growing reliance on FBOs embeds welfare within networks of patronage and moral (as well as political) surveillance, further blurring the line between public service and political and/or religious loyalty. In the Turkish case, this transition reinforces authoritarian tendencies by tying social support to allegiance rather than rights, thereby weakening the emancipatory potential of welfare distribution and deepening social hierarchies.
