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"Zencirci introduces the concept of the Muslim Social, defined as a welfare regime that reimagined and reconfigured Islamic charitable practices to address the complex needs of a modern market society. Although these governmental assemblages of Islamic neoliberalism produced new forms of generosity, distinctive notions of poverty, and novel ways of relating to others in society, Zencirci reveals how this welfare regime privileged managerial efficiency and emotional well-being at the expense of other objectives such as equality, development, or justice"--

Abstract
This article contributes to the social history of neoliberalism by analyzing the emotions, feelings, and sentiments through which Turkish people experienced the structural adjustment program of the 1980s. I argue that market reforms were experienced through a paradoxical entanglement of desire and disillusionment—an affective politics that Lauren Berlant defines as "cruel optimism." This concept captures the ways in which neoliberalism generates a series of aspirations, longings, and yearnings that can never be fully achieved or satisfied but nevertheless pulls subjects toward an imagined future. I examine these collective feelings through a visual analysis of Kemalist intellectual Turhan Selçuk's editorial cartoons that were published in the center-left newspaper Milliyet between 1983 and 1986. These editorial cartoons function in complex ways, providing relief through satire but also narrating the ways in which a sense of optimism encircled sentiments of anxiety, despair, and precarity. I identify three distinctive instances of cruel optimism in his work: first, the will to retain control over economic affairs despite the dominance of international organizations, second, the hope that trade liberalization shall bring prosperity amidst mounting class inequality, and third, the allure of consumption even when most of the population was unable to afford export commodities. Rather than demonstrating a clear temporal gap between the promise and demise of market reforms, the article reveals the coproduction of two oppositional affective registers and suggests that the fluctuation between willingness and reluctance is a constitutive element of neoliberal subjectivity.

AbstractIn this article, I argue that shifting development discourses have shaped the meaning and function ofvakıfs (religious endowments) in Turkey since the establishment of the republic in 1923. I identify three periods defined by their distinctive development discourse, and show how each of these discourses madevakıfs into both an object and a site of development. In the etatist discourse of the 1930s,vakıfs were articulated as national treasures tasked with financing state-led economic development. With the shift to a mixed economy discourse in the 1960s,vakıfs were reconfigured as private philanthropic foundations expected to create a skilled labor force. The neoliberal development discourse of the 1980s transformedvakıfs into welfare organizations focused on poverty. This article shows that in all three of these periods, the relationship between state, Islam, economy, and society was articulated, legitimized, and consolidated with reference to a seemingly stagnant but in fact malleable institution inherited from the Ottoman Empire—thevakıf. I refer to this process as the "local production of development," a conceptualization emphasizing how global discourses of development are formed and transformed at the local level.

Emergent social assistance programmes in developing countries are either considered to possibly signal the transition to a post-neoliberal era, or are taken to constitute a move towards neoliberal welfare governance. By examining the making of a social assistance-based welfare regime in Turkey, I argue that the expansion of social programmes are the product of the neoliberalism-plus conjuncture which takes market inequality as a given. Specifically, this article analyses the similarity of nominally opposed concepts of welfare in the Turkish debate between conservative Islamists and secular Kemalists. By examining the "sadaka culture" debate and the constitutive rights vs. belief binary, the following analysis illustrates that although these two political groups appear to disagree about welfare governance, in reality this on-going debate actually masks the consolidation of social assistance as a welfare norm. I argue that social assistance operates as a bio-political strategy that transforms state power, restructures welfare governance and generates new understandings of poverty, need and aid in the neoliberalism-plus conjuncture.

By drawing from authors' fieldwork in Egypt, Palestine, and Turkey, this article critically examines perceptions of project-think among civic organizations in the Middle East. As a managerial rationality, project-think has four key components: (a) a prioritization of discrete needs and discrete groups, (b) an orientation toward funding, (c) a focus on short-term and measurable results, and (d) the positioning of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as career ladders. Through unpacking these four components, we find that project-think is perceived to contribute to the fragmentation of civil society by fracturing social issues, dividing the NGO sector, isolating organizational energy, and complicating relations between groups. Simultaneously, we demonstrate that, civic actors use various strategies to circumvent the perceived impacts of fragmentation. By mapping these intertwined meanings and experiences of fragmentation and defragmentation, this study contributes to debates concerning the political effects of managerialism among civil society in the Global South.