Do service-networks in the Gülen Movement ever select short-term projects?
If specific issues are connected with universal values (peace, human rights, poverty relief, and so on), short-term projects can be taken up, allowing an immediate and correspondingly transitory mobilization. Examples of this have been earthquake relief for Pakistan, Peru and Haiti, Far East tsunami aid, African famine and poverty relief, and other relief efforts in disaster-hit countries.
Such action is carried out within the bounds of transnational consensus and legality. Different components converge in such mobilizations – institutions, the media, luminaries from the art world, and foreign authorities. What is striking about these short-term service-projects is that Hizmet draws especially upon local service-networks, leisure time and also professionalized commitment. In this way, the collective actor of the Movement establishes relationships and co-operates with the institutions or professionalized sectors of the market for short-term mobilizations. A good example of this was the football match organized between a world team and the Turkish national team for Bosnian-Croatian orphans, whose education had been disrupted by lack of facilities and finances after the war.
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