Humanitarian statecraft in Turkey: racialised conjurings of Islamic and African political futures

This article theorises humanitarian statecraft, a hitherto unexamined form of state-civil society relation, in which NGOs conjure the state through humanitarian practice. Bringing Barbara and Karen Fields’ notion of racecraft into conversation with Timothy Mitchell’s theorisation of the state, I analyse the co-conjuring of race and state within a single analytical framework. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2024) I conducted with two Islamic humanitarian NGOs in Konya, Ankara, and Istanbul, I argue that these organisations do not merely replace or partner with the state; rather, they conjure it as a racialised formation. The first part of the article develops what I call the ‘Konya consensus,’ tracing REMA’s vision of an Islamic Union to the Milli Görüş (National Outlook) tradition and to its global expansion under the Justice and Development Party. Through humanitarian projects across the African continent and the broader Muslim world, REMA naturalises the idea of Turkish leadership for a future Islamic Union by positioning Turkish Muslims as the vanguard of the umma. The second part examines SADA, a conservative nationalist NGO that sponsors African students in Turkey and seeks to cultivate statist, sacrificial subjectivities oriented toward ‘strong’ African statehood that is modelled on Turkish racio-statecraft. Here, the failed African state thesis (Hill 2005; Gruffydd Jones 2008; Wai 2012) meets the myth of the eternal Turkish state (Berktay 1990; Copeaux 1997; Özdoğan 2001; Altınay 2004; Ersanlı 2009), reworking global discourses of weak and failed states through ableist and racialised metaphors of bodily (in)capacity and sacrifice. This article extends critiques of race in international humanitarianism beyond the framework of white supremacy, ultimately developing a new critical lens for understanding emerging forms of multipolar humanitarianism.