Turkey's "Benevolent expansion" in Somalia: Development gifts and power resources of an emerging country

This dissertation analyzes Turkey-Somalia development partnership from a comparative historical and relational perspective, while addressing gift theories to interpret Turkey's aid politics. Emerging donors introduce new discourses, practices, and institutions into international aid architecture, and they are assumed to be transforming North-South hierarchies. Turkey has gained an emerging donor reputation and Somalia is the most comprehensive example to analyze Turkey's changing aid politics. I argue that aid modalities change historically, but states use foreign aid to expand their power resources. I compare post-colonial Italian development aid, Cold War Soviet military aid, and Turkey's humanitarian aid to post-state collapse Somalia. I question the relation between donor states' expansionist interests and their aid politics. After the World War 2, former colonist Italy used development aid to restore its plantations, to monopolize Somali banana trade, and hence to actualize a neo-imperial expansion. During the Cold War, the USSR wanted to counterbalance the US presence in Ethiopia, and provided arms to Somalia to access its naval facilities; thus, Moscow achieved a geopolitical expansion through military aid. After two decades from Somalia's destructive 1991 civil war, Turkey responded to the country's severe drought crisis with a humanitarian intervention in 2011, and humanitarian aid created an unexpected opportunity for an emerging country to accumulate power resources in a "failed state." To compare Turkey's aid politics to Italian and Soviet aid regimes, I question the relation between humanitarian aid and material gains. I establish that Turkey's state-led aid campaign incorporated foreign policy interest, the humanitarian imperative, and Islamic charity ethics. Based on parliamentary archives between 2002-2015, I show that Turkey's AKP government firstly approached Somalia to leverage its regional leadership claims, but later 2011 humanitarian aid campaign discursively concealed Turkey's foreign policy objectives with a compassionate rhetoric of saving lives. Relying on expert interviews conducted with Turkey's official and faith-based NGO actors, I establish that Islamic ethics and nationalist aspirations informed the making of aid projects, where charity and foreign policy concerns blended disinterested and self-interested motives. By addressing theories on gift exchange, I define Turkey's aid politics as a "benevolent expansion". In the last chapter, I interpret Somali community's positive and negative responses toward Turkey's endeavors through in-depth interviews conducted with Somali scholarship students, entrepreneurs, and academics in Turkey and elsewhere. Turkey's scholarship programs triggered a student migration, and graduates initiated diasporic networks in Turkey. I conclude that access to economic gains determines the perception of transnational Somali community toward Turkey either as a win-win partner or as a foreign actor accumulating unequal benefits.