The trees in Gezi Park: environmental policy as the focus of democratic protests

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe protests that took place across Turkey in the summer of 2013 started as a bottom-up response to the plans of the government and Istanbul municipality to build a shopping mall on a small yet symbolic park in the cultural heart of the city. Taking the name of this point of origin, Gezi Park protests have quickly turned into a countrywide resistance movement against the hyper-developmentalist environmental and urban policies of the government, and the authoritarian tendencies of PM (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan. The movement unified opposition from all sides of the political spectrum, and transformed not only environmental discourses and policy-making but also the language in Turkish politics. Using Laclauian discourse theory and 25 semi-structured interviews with protesters and opinion leaders, this article documents how environmental policy has become the focus of popular dissent and analyses the signifiers around which the resistance has emerged. The hegemonic struggles between the government and the protestors and the lasting effects of the protests are critically discussed, to scrutinise the increasingly focal place of environmental discourses in the global conjuncture.