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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the afterlives of project-based humanitarianism shaping aid for urban poor Syrians in Istanbul. It traces funding cuts, deportation regimes, and donor performativity by theorizing the “project afterlife” and its tensions with return, recovery, and deservingness.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the afterlives of projectized humanitarianism amid political ruptures and disasters that reconfigure aid regimes targeting Syrians living in urban poverty in Istanbul. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how drastic cuts to and redirection of international funding (accelerated by the rise of right-wing governance, the suspension of major aid streams such as USAID, and the fall of the Assad regime in December 2025) reshaped both the material conditions of assistance and the moral economies through which displacement, recovery, and “return” are governed.

Simultaneously, the Turkish state that has long positioned itself as the savior of oppressed Muslim siblings scaled back assistance and intensified its deportation regime as it receives a diminishing share of global humanitarian circulation. Despite an acute crisis in healthcare, education, and shelter, donor institutions continue to prioritize performative interventions (such as climate justice workshops while urban poor Syrians live in disaster-prone housing) or make access to services contingent upon return to Syria. I situate these shifts within what I call the "project afterlife": the disjuncture between temporal horizons and ideological premises of donor-driven projects and ongoing, nonlinear crises that structure displaced lives.

This paper investigates three key tensions arising from this disjuncture: (1) how teleology of project-based aid obscures the structural realities of post-catastrophe survival; (2) how project mentality manufactures the subjectivity of Syrians, upholding a hierarchy of deservingness independent from material need; and (3) how local organizations metabolize and repurpose these rigid project narratives to meet the urgent, everyday demands of the community.