Refugees as ‘Projects’: Humanitarian Responses to Displacement and Refugee-Led Organisations in Southern Turkey

The Turkish city of Adana is renowned for its cosmopolitan landscape and relative success in hosting, and governing, large numbers of Syrian refugees since 2011. This article offers a comparative analysis of Northern influence in the humanitarian approach that works with refugees as ‘projects’, as opposed to local intimate encounters that seek to embody non-transient and local social and solidary forms of relatedness with and between refugees, particularly refugee women. Through a dual focus on non-governmental organisations’ livelihood and social integration projects and on refugee-led organisations, I examine the ways in which projects that are mostly funded by international donors have become the ‘norm’ of relatedness with Syrian refugees in Turkey and in turn interrogate the possibilities of refugee involvement and emergent forms of solidarity beyond humanitarian aid projects in Southern Turkey. Through an ethnography of Syrian refugee-led, international and national NGOs operating in the field of humanitarianism in Adana, I problematise the notions of humanitarian aid and NGO ‘empowerment’ and livelihood projects – which are written, conducted and funded by international actors – and gender in displacement. Presenting alternative modes of responses and social solidarity by analysing a refugee-led organisation, I argue that refugees’ positioning as the ‘beneficiaries’ of projects creates a ‘cycle of dependencies’ and that the lack of intimate encounters prevents a peaceful conviviality in the borderlands, which also creates a false sense of refugee needs and heterogeneity. Finally, I propose that, in order to go beyond the humanitarian colonial gaze and to create a space of non-transient relations and dialogues, it is necessary to articulate disjunctures in humanitarian responses to displacement and to increase the number of interactive domains throughout.