Gezi Insurgency as ‘Counter-Conduct’

Abstract

This article defines the Gezi insurgency as a case of ‘counter-conduct’ with a heterotopia in a Foucauldian sense and compares it with similar movements to underline its peculiarity. It argues that Gezi cannot be defined as an ‘anti-austerity’ or ‘anti-dictatorship’ movement. Rather, it was a struggle against the neoliberal-cum-neoconservative conduct under AKP rule and its leadership taking the form of a pseudo-presidential regime. Gezi not only was a search for a different conduct but also a possible self-conduct through self-invention in prefigurative experimentations with different ways of being and practicing direct democracy in the reclaimed public spaces that characterized the action process. What sustained this counter-action process was the spontaneous constitution or deployment of certain platforms like Blok and Çarşı which did not, in themselves, express or represent any given social or political organization nor a corresponding form of a generic identity. In the Gezi insurgency, actors tended to outflow their defining social categories and become a part of the series of performances in which a sense of self-transformation has been common.