ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relation between charity and civil activism under conditions of state violence and corruption. The boundary between these phenomena is often indistinct – charity may represent an entrée into political activism, a façade for civil organisation or it may be a component of militant civil society, struggling to remedy the hardships caused by the state. State repression and persecution may drive charitable organisations into the forum of political or human rights resistance. Conversely relentless persecution in the form of harassment, detention, torture may induce some civil society activists to turn towards charitable civic engagement.
Marxists and other socialists have forcefully criticised charity as a diversion from political struggle. This critique is valid for states where civil and political society operate relatively freely. In more repressive states charity may become a form of resistance, played out, just as human rights struggles are, in the Gramscian arena of civil society and pitted against the same foe. In Turkey more than in any other state in the study, charitable work is consciously engaged in as part of a wider struggle guided by socialist ideals.
