Усилване на гражданската ангажираност по интернет: три НПО в турски контекст
Empowering the Civic Engagement on the Internet: Three NGO in the Turkish Context

Summary/Abstract: As the number of Non-Governmental Orga-nizations (NGOs) is rapidly increases in Turkey, the question whether those organizations actively encourage citizen online deliberation still stays unanswered. While there is extensive civil so-ciety-based deliberation online around the world, there is no known research conducted on Turkish NGOs’ drawing attention to particular issues on local or national level in the deliberative demo-cracy framework. This paper examines how three Turkish NGOs use the Internet as a forum for fostering online deliberation and also for encou-ragement of civil and political engagement. In other words, it relies on deliberative democracy debates to shed the light on the problems of Tur-kish NGOs in terms of creating civil engage-ment. The question, however, is to what extent NGOs use the decentralized techno-logy of the Internet to publicize their messages and whether they are aware of the effectiveness of this unique feature. Thus, this paper only focuses on the civic organizations’ perspective and their use of the Internet to empower the deliberative ideals excluding the possible effects of the online deliberation on the community. As a methodo-logy, in-depth interviews have been conducted with NGOs in the search of a broader perspec-tive on the relationship between the Internet and civil society in Turkey.

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