Civil Voices Festival 2023 Background

When the coronavirus pandemic turned our lives upside down, we once again began to talk about the importance of solidarity. When physical distancing, masks, quarantines, school and workplace closures, and curfews entered our lives—regardless of what we thought about the cause of the pandemic or how appropriate we found the public measures—we held on to the principle of solidarity to protect one another from this public health crisis.

All around the world, governments and corporations were heavily criticized. As the lack of healthcare services and preventive measures became a global crisis, voluntary efforts by citizens came to the forefront everywhere, and once again, there was consensus on the key role of civil society in times of crisis.

Civil society organizations, while voicing critiques of public policies and offering solutions, also mobilized large-scale solidarity in neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, hospitals, and streets—ranging from meeting everyday shopping needs to producing medical supplies. During this period, we also witnessed an increase in communication and cooperation among CSOs themselves. Organizations from different fields and individuals with diverse worldviews came together, believing in the necessity of solidarity in the face of the pandemic. They stood together against the dismantling of cultural life, which for some time had been treated as the first measure to suspend in every crisis.

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And just as we were beginning to leave behind the days of the pandemic, we faced an unprecedented disaster. On February 6, 2023, tens of thousands of people lost their lives in the earthquake, and the lives of millions more were completely disrupted.

In the face of this catastrophe that deeply shook our lives, civil society organizations mobilized all their capacities from the very first moments, once again becoming a channel for a wave of solidarity that spanned millions. From the first days of search and rescue efforts to later addressing needs in housing, food, education, and psychosocial support, CSOs remained on the ground. Now, we face a long reconstruction process expected to last years, and there is still a pressing need for every form of solidarity.

Solidarity has always been the spirit of civil society. Wherever there is a rights violation, injustice, inequality, or people deprived of their rights—wherever living beings are threatened, or lifeless ones are destroyed—solidarity has been there. Among exploited workers, oppressed peasants, Black communities facing racism, women confronting patriarchy, LGBT+ individuals facing homophobia, persons with disabilities encountering barriers, migrants seeking a livable home, rights defenders resisting violations, and across all of them—without solidarity, many of today’s social movements might not even exist.

We can say that civil society is very much a field of relations woven from solidarity. Solidarity is a vital tool and a necessary condition for tackling the social problems we care about in our respective fields. If we want change, there is no alternative but to unite our strengths. Shared problems, identities, values, and ideals bring us together; solidarity amplifies what we can achieve collectively and empowers every individual within it. Without solidarity, we believe, there can be no civil coordination, no civil cooperation.

But is solidarity around civil organizations only about solving crises? Doesn’t civil solidarity also provide a space for individuals increasingly alienated from today’s social and economic systems to realize themselves, find trust, socialize, connect, feel a sense of belonging, take initiative, and become agents in their own lives—not to mention simply to be good neighbors? Especially in an age often described as one of “polycrises,” where new disaster scenarios feel increasingly likely.

The world is indeed becoming more uncertain and unsafe. Endless regional wars are now amounting to genocide in Palestine. The need for solidarity knows no borders, echoing across the globe. Ask anyone, and they’ll describe our era as an age of uncertainty, wars, insecurity, polarization, poverty, confinement, data surveillance, artificial intelligence, environmental crisis, acceleration, and last chances.

In the face of these crises, isn’t it clearer than ever that to strengthen the resilience of our societies, solidarity-based behaviors and organizations must be reinforced? Didn’t the February earthquakes show us the indispensable contribution of social organizing to the solidarity required to overcome such a crisis?

Perhaps one reason we are now experiencing both despair and hope, helplessness and remedies, fear and trust, darkness and light, disorganization and organization—all at once and intertwined—is precisely this.

For this reason, the opening session of this year’s Civil Voices Festival is titled “Civil Society and Solidarity in the Age of Crises.”

In this session, we will collectively search for answers to questions such as: If we are in need of solidarity, how can we strengthen its foundational elements? How can we expand its social base? How can we overcome geographical and human boundaries? How can we remove the obstacles to solidarity? How can we reinforce the ethics of solidarity? How can we prevent solidarity from falling into the trap of reproducing inequality? What can we learn from each other’s stories of solidarity? How can we strengthen the trust and commitment essential for solidarity? How can we stand together more effectively?

If solidarity is the soul of civil society, then sadly, it is in times of disaster that this spirit becomes most embodied and tangible among us. And unfortunately, disasters are becoming more frequent. Earthquakes, floods, landslides, avalanches, storms, wildfires, mining accidents, and industrial disasters—all, in the absence of preventive measures, turn into crises with human, material, economic, and environmental losses.

The existing fragilities, problems, and deficiencies in our institutional infrastructures cause disasters to escalate into large-scale crises of shelter, health, education, food, water, and sanitation. Moreover, groups with specific needs—such as women, LGBT+ individuals, people with disabilities, children, the poor, and migrants—experience these crises most acutely, often facing violations of even their most basic rights.

In such circumstances, when a massive wave of solidarity is required to “heal the wounds,” one face of civil society’s solidarity spirit turns toward restoring living conditions, while another focuses on monitoring and documenting human rights crises and offering solutions for inadequate public policies.

We thus face a dual task: On one hand, it is clear that we must collectively improve our risk and crisis management capacities in a country prone to disasters. We must build a human rights–based culture of crisis management in every city, neighborhood, sector, and organization, ensuring that humanitarian efforts during disasters are carried out with a human rights approach, and make solidarity principled and organized. The earthquakes in Kahramanmaraş showed us that this responsibility is not limited to CSOs working solely in the fields of disaster or humanitarian aid.

On the other hand, it is equally important for civil society to carry out effective monitoring, advocacy, and cooperation to support both central and local public authorities in conducting disaster risk reduction, prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery processes in line with universal human rights standards. The unpredictability of risks, the magnitude of crises, the urgency of needs, and the limits of available resources must not be allowed to create a ground for violations through neglect, postponement, or trivialization. Organizing magnificent solidarity to prevent this requires the contribution of civil society.

This is not unique to Türkiye. Everywhere in the world, the multidimensional and multilayered nature of disaster risks brings forth this dual role of civil society solidarity.

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted at the 2015 UN World Conference, reflects this international consensus by outlining the roles of civil society, volunteers, organized volunteer initiatives, and community-based organizations:

“In the development and implementation of normative frameworks, standards, and plans for disaster risk reduction, civil society should cooperate with public institutions, provide expertise when necessary, and guide implementation; take part in the implementation processes of national, regional, and global plans and strategies; contribute to and support the culture of learning about and teaching disaster risk reduction as well as social awareness; and appropriately support the approach of resilient communities, synergies across different groups, and inclusive disaster risk management for all of society.”

For all these reasons, the closing session of the Civil Voices Festival will be titled “Disasters, Civil Society, and Solidarity.”

In Türkiye, joint efforts to support social solidarity and inter-institutional cooperation in disasters go back more than twenty years. Over this long process, civil society organizations have come together under various names, and today they continue their work under the umbrella of the Disaster Platform (Afet Platformu). Founded after the Elazığ earthquake in 2020 with the participation of 24 CSOs with diverse expertise to enable better and faster disaster response, the Disaster Platform soon began steps toward institutionalizing its governance structures and processes in 2021. Today, with 58 members, it stands as the broadest civil society network in the field of disasters in Türkiye—and will also take part in the festival with the session titled “A Tradition of Solidarity in Civil Society: The Disaster Platform.”