The 'Benevolent Hand' of the Turkish State: Mass Housing Administration, State Restructuring and Capital Accumulation in Turkey

This thesis argues that the contemporary phase of capitalism is marked by a perceived need to get the institutional setting right for the sake of the market. In the Turkish context, the institutional turn initiated just after the economic crisis of 2001 deepened and institutionalized market relations in a variety of fields. This state restructuring process triggered new contradictions among different fractions of capital, between classes, and altered the capitalist states relationship to each of these. The Turkish Mass Housing Administration (Toplu Konut Idaresi [TOKI]) is taken as the laboratory to capture the tension between getting the institutional setting right to enable the housing market and the authoritarian tendencies of state restructuring in relation to different fractions of capital. The TOKI model, as the World Bank designates the Turkish states institutionalization in the housing sector, is celebrated in terms of its scaling-up of the housing market and for its expansion of commodity relations in housing across Turkey. But TOKI also emerges as a scapegoat and as a center of clientelism due to the non-transparent relationships between the state and particular fractions of capital that it fosters. In order to analyze this contradiction, this dissertation attempts to answer the following question: Why does this content enabling the housing market take this particular form TOKI , especially after 2003 in Turkey? While answering this question, the dissertation connects TOKI, as a component of the contemporary neoliberal authoritarian state form, to the formation of a capitalist housing sector as a long-term aim of the Turkish state, of different fractions of capital, and of international financial institutions (IFIs) the World Bank and IMF.