The Experts of Human Solidarity: Understanding and Governing Poverty in Neoliberal Turkey

Preliminary abstract: This research asks how humanitarian discourse and practices have transformed the ways of understanding and governing poverty in Turkey by focusing on two major forms of the humanitarian approach to poverty: poverty relief and urban displacement. Using the institutional framework developed by the World Bank to enable a humanitarian response to the 1999 earthquake in Turkey, the Turkish government restructured poverty alleviation programs as an extension of this approach and thus transformed the ways poverty is understood, how it is to be solved, and what are its futures. Broadly within a liberal discourse of governance, these programs have produced their own 'experts' -- individuals who are granted the authority to conduct objective assessments on the basis of which poverty relief will be carried out. At the same time, the government uses the language of humanitarian intervention to displace a million poor households in order to prevent casualties of a possible earthquake. By conducting ethnographic research among those who are subjected to humanitarian policies and those who are the experts of poverty in multiple institutions, this research will explore how the contradictory forms of humanitarianism, i.e. poverty relief and mass displacement, inform, shape and transform the politics of poverty for different actors.