Gezi Protests Research Articles

Pınar BEDİRHANOGLU, Çağlar DÖLEK, Funda HÜLAGÜ and Özlem KAYGUSUZ (Eds.), Turkey’s New State in the Making: Transformations in Legality, Economy, and Coercion (London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)

Turkey’s political history has seen recurring shifts between democratic ideals and authoritarian tendencies, notably during the two decades of the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) rule. This transition marked a departure from a relatively democratic façade that emerged in response to the European Union (EU) accession process towards a more authoritarian regime characterized by increased government control and curtailment of civil liberties. It is a shift accentuated after the 2013 Gezi protests which culminated in a significant regime change in 2018. This transformation was marked by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s consolidation of power through constitutional amendments, leading to the transition from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential system. To comprehend this transformation, it is imperative to examine the interplay between economic dynamics and the state within the neo-liberal capitalist system, aligning with Poulantzas’ observations on global trends. It can be argued that the accumulation and state crises, exacerbated by the 2008 global economic crisis, have contributed to Turkey’s authoritarian shift in parallel with global developments.

Social Media in the Popular Turkish Newspapers

This article focuses on how social media is represented in newspapers by analyzing two popular Turkish newspapers in the last decade, from 2013 to 2021. The news was examined with qualitative content analysis supported by MAXQDA software which is used to generate codings from the text while reading each news item. The article first reviews the literature on social media and the news. Afterward, the findings of the textual analysis are shared with diagrams and in an organized way around the themes. Some chosen examples are discussed with a special focus on the visuals and the headlines which are translated. The article reveals that social media, starting as the mobilizing force during the Gezi protests, over the years, gained new meanings in the news. In conclusion, it is suggested to categorize the following represented themes from 2013 to 2021 under the two frames as negative and positive. While the first includes the themes of disinformation and harm, crime, and access problems, the positive frame consists of the themes of new apps, services and technology, publicity, and using social media campaigns for good causes. 
 The article argues how the newspapers, with the content of the news as these themes and with the form of the news with short, superficial, and under-investigated reporting as shown in the examples, in accordance with the context, amplify primarily authoritarianism and commercialism and ends with the suggestions.

Critical Mass Theory and Participation in Social Movements: The Case of Gezi Protests in Turkey

The meeting organized in Gezi Park on May 27th, 2013 to protest the construction of a mall in the historical park has turned into a nationwide collective movement with a gradual increase in the number of participants from different ages, classes, and political backgrounds in an era in which the young were claimed to be apolitical in comparison to the 1968 generation of Turkey. The phenomenon did not only draw the attention of the international press and news during those times but also turned into an outstanding and popular topic for academic studies. Therefore, there are several publications analyzing the Gezi Uprising and the profile, psychology, and motivation of Gezi participants. Using critical mass theory to analyze the data collected through literature review, this study examines the collective action and interdependence of the heterogeneous participant profiles with different motivations in order to understand how the Gezi protests of 2013 emerged as the largest social movement of Turkish political and social history. This study does not aim to fully answer why there are no large-scale demonstrations despite the rate of discontent in today’s Turkey being much higher than that of 2013; however, critical mass theory certainly provides sufficient background to interpret participation in social movements en masse in the post-Cold War era when there is no political leader and organization leading the uprisings.

From Where Women Knowledge Workers Stand: the Making of an Emancipatory Standpoint during and since the Gezi Protests

Abstract This article rethinks Gezi Protests as a sui generis women’s movement which continues to this day, albeit in a form of unorganized flow. To make this point, the article focuses on the Gezi and Post-Gezi lifeworld experiences of women knowledge workers who participated in the Protests. It is argued that the worker-citizen experiences of these women have provided them with a specific epistemic advantage, which has turned in an emancipatory standpoint during the Gezi and has been reproduced since then – despite significant setbacks. Although still lacking a corresponding feminist counter-hegemonic project, the emancipatory standpoint of the women-in-movement of Gezi Protests is not only negative and adaptive but also formative. It immanently stands for the rationalization of all forms of governance. In that regard, it represents a wish for a new public power rather than a demand for entitlement and recognition by an already existing state.

AB'nin Türkiye'deki Sivil Toplum Örgütlerine Finansal Desteği: Gezi Süreci Sonrası Siyasi Alanın Daralması mı?

This study investigates the EU’s stance on post-Gezi civic engagement, which is based on alternative alliances and against the anti-democratic extremes of state power. Using a Gramscian perspective, the paper underlines the fact that before the protests, Turkey’s civil society had been politically socialized by the help of EU financial assistance as a sign of an ideology of consent. That is, the EU has focused on liberal-democratic cooperation with civic organic intellectuals, based on the conviction that civil society is the engine for social and political transformation. However, even though civil society organizations have strengthened their catalysing role and become a new counter-hegemonic political space since the Gezi protests, it is argued that Turkey’s normative distance from the EU and the pragmatic links between the EU and Turkey over refugees have led the EU to reduce its financial relationships with Turkey’s rights-based civil society.

From Exit to Voice: Reflections on Exile through the Accounts of Turkey’s Intelligentsia

: The authoritarian turn in Turkey compelled many citizens to change life trajectories which included extreme measures such as migration and exile. Thousands of people left Turkey in the last decade, this recent wave constituting one of the largest Turkish migrations to Europe and beyond. The profile of the migrants included those who were comfortable with and/or opposed the current regime’s political and social policies, members of oppressed minority groups, Gülen movement members who are accused of orchestrating the failed 2016 coup attempt as well as white collar and secular Turkish citizens who made lifestyle migration choices because of the political and economic developments in the country. The article focuses on the narratives of a specific group within this new wave, those whom we refer to as Turkey’s intelligentsia in exile, and who decided to leave Turkey following the Gezi protests in 2013. The findings are based on 25 interviews conducted in 2021 with former academics, activists, artists, journalists and politicians who migrated to a variety of locations as a result of pending trials or arrest warrants against them, dehumanization discourse that pro-regime politicians directed toward them, as well as lack of freedom of speech and assembly.

Use of Religion in Blame Avoidance in a Competitive Authoritarian Regime: Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet)

Blame avoidance has been one of the most applied strategies by policy makers in both democratic and non-democratic regimes to avoid responsibility and accountability in cases of failure and tragic events. It is also known that politicians have used religion for Machiavellian purposes, as exactly advised by Machiavelli. However, a systematic empirical analysis of how religion is used for blame avoidance by politicians has not been conducted. In this article, we aim to address this gap by examining the empirical data derived from the weekly Friday sermon texts produced by Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs and delivered in more than 90 thousand mosques every week to a large segment of the population in Turkey, where the majority claims to be religious. Starting with its violent response to the peaceful Gezi protests in 2013, the ruling AKP has opened up a new phase in Turkish political history by resorting to civilizational populism: it blamed the Western world for financing and masterminding the protests, using the protestors as internal pawns to attack Turkey and the Muslim World, suppressed the protests brutally and entered into a populist authoritarian regime. Our paper shows, following this turn, how the Diyanet sermons started using religion to help with the AKP’s blame avoidance. The Diyanet either parroted the AKP’s conspiratorial narrative or tried to convince the citizens that all negativities are works of God and with these humans are being tested by God. The AKP’s use of religion to avoid blame is a text-book case of how both a religious institution and religious discourse can be used to help the incumbent avoid responsibility. Whenever, there was a problem that would the AKP votes, the Diyanet’s sermons tried to shift the blame to either God or citizens or conspiratorial enemies.

Narrow Responses to Social Movements: Evidence from Turkey’s Gezi Protests

ABSTRACT Research on the outcomes of major protests indicates that opposition parties tend to respond with a combination of support and negligence. This article suggests a novel mechanism through which opposition parties maintain this balancing act. Based on an original dataset of interventions in the Turkish Parliament around the 2013 Gezi Protests, I argue that representatives from two left-wing opposition parties supported the movement, but in narrow and even contradictory ways. The Kemalist opposition party CHP emphasised identity markers of the activists but downplayed the issues raised in the protests, while the pro-Kurdish BDP did the opposite. I argue that such narrow issue-centered or actor-centered responses reflected a strategy to simultaneously placate core supporters – Turkish nationalists and Kurdish voters – while giving the impression of being fully supportive of the movement as a whole. One implication of this study is that broad-based movements may be a mixed blessing for democratisation, as they enable opposition parties to cherry-pick their favourite aspects of the protests. Parties may explicitly support a movement but simultaneously deflect attention away from the core issues protesters raise or amplify a narrow set of their pre-established positions.

The uses of Twitter in the construction and maintenance of Occupy Gezi’s collective identity

ABSTRACT This empirical research investigates the uses of Twitter and long-term communication practices in the construction process of Occupy Gezi’s collective identity since the eruption of the Gezi protests until the constitutional referendum campaign in 2017. This article emphasises the latent phase of the movement, by combining Melucci’s processual and dynamic approach to collective identity with a practice-oriented ecological perspective to the media/movements studies. Based on in-depth interviews and the analysis of the common Twitter followings among the interviewees, this article provides empirical insights into the use of Twitter in the collective identity construction process through analysing its three main elements: (1) the identification of we and them, (2) development of informal networks and (3) expression and negotiation of collective identity. Extending the existing body of literature, which focus on instantaneous uses and short-term instances, it complements the research on the nexus of collective identity and social media, by focusing on the daily practices, motivations and experiences of the activists on Twitter in interaction with evolving media ecology and other actors in its local context. This study indicates the uses of Twitter and new communicative practices in the latent phase for the continuity of Occupy Gezi, in which they maintained, promoted and negotiated collective identity. Thus, they could still keep and pass the movement’s repertoire, values, language and resistance culture to successors, even in the direct antagonistic confrontation of the authorities.

Strategizing post-protest activism in abeyance: retaining activist capital under political constraint

ABSTRACT The initial optimism on the revival of civic activism in Turkey following the Gezi protests in 2013 was short-lived. The deteriorating legal and political environment has considerably narrowed the civic space for civil society activity. However, the mass mobilizations in 2017 and 2019 showed not only the ongoing willingness but also the activist groups’ ongoing capacity to collectively defy, resist and contend. This article focuses on this capacity which I term as the activist capital. More specifically, this article analyses post-Gezi activists’ ability to adapt to deteriorating conditions and to retain the activist capital during abeyance. This article argues that activist capital is necessary to understand how activist groups sustain their movement in the post-Gezi environment in Turkey. By combining it with the concept of activist capital as a variable, this article enhances the abeyance theory and helps us better interpret movement continuity in repressive political environments. This article also shows how the activist groups act strategically to retain their activist capital.

Solidarity under lockdown: Political participation practices of alternative solidarity networks in Turkey

In Turkey, the crackdown on dissident voices following Gezi protests in 2013 and the lack of trust towards the mainstream media highlighted the need for alternative networks of information and organization. This research examines the solidarity networks that were built to address this need during the COVID-19 pandemic in five different districts of İstanbul through eleven semi-structured interviews to gain a better understanding of the current political climate of the country by examining the roots of these solidarity networks, their organization practices and the challenges that are presented to them by inner conflicts and the political economy of the country.

From self-censorship to contention: Shame triggered participation in the 2013 Gezi Protests

Focusing on journalists’ professional behaviors during the 2013 Gezi Protests in Turkey, this article offers a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of inertia into contentious action. Accordingly, the emotion of shame triggers contention when it is experienced with a contingent event that generates hope for change. In Turkey, journalists working in the mainstream media extensively practiced self-censorship before the 2013 Gezi Protests and felt ashamed of themselves. This feeling became a trigger for joining public protests, resigning and/or producing non-compliant news stories when Gezi offered them an opportunity for social change. This argument builds on the sociology of emotions and events, and is inductively derived from 20 in-depth interviews conducted with journalists. The article presents the social context in which shame arises and the place of this emotion in generating contention. Through this research, the Gezi Protests assert their continuing relevance for understanding the relationship between repression and contention, especially in countries hit by the current wave of authoritarianism.

Public Reminiscence and Official Commemoration: The Paris Commune of 1871 and the Gezi Protests of 2013

On Paris’ Montmartre hill, the visitor is confronted by a puzzling number of padlocks, objects of reminiscence left by individuals on the surrounding railings. As individual acts of reminiscence, these padlocks are indifferent to the historicized design materiality and the discursive space of the basilica, which oscillates between manifestations of Catholic piety in late nineteenth-century France and a grim reminder of the disproportionate suppression of the Commune of 1871. Sacré-Coeur offers a framework for understanding the rhetorical function of the commemorative practices connected with Turkey’s authoritarian AKP regime and its new mosques. They similarly set up a paradox between the manifestations of an oppressive political rhetoric – expressed through a historicized architectural style – and the individually driven cultural responses they provoke. This essay examines the amalgamation of these design materialities and politics, which, it suggests, are open to reinterpretation through group and individual actions that alter the way people experience monuments.

Urban Neighbourhood Forums in Ankara as a Commoning Practice

AbstractThe neighbourhood forums in Ankara began to convene during the Gezi protests in 2013 and lasted about three years. The activities of Ankara Gezi forums are urban commoning practices in terms of a new set of demands and methods. This paper conceptualises urban commoning practices as method, content, and demand. This framework offers an understanding of urban commoning that is not based on monetary transaction, but focuses on seeing commoning as a social process. Commoning is not ahistorical, rather it is engaged with the historical political potential of urban spaces. Commoning as method discusses organising in commons, commoning as content focuses on the form and meaning of political action, and commoning as demand emphasises the discursive use of right to the city. The case selection of this research enables us to reflect on how urban commoning is experienced in a city under less financial investment pressure, but at the centre of national‐level politics.

Protester-police fraternization in the 2013 Gezi Park uprisings

ABSTRACT The 2013 Gezi protests still remain the largest to have arisen in the AKP era of governance in Turkey. In light of substantial interdisciplinary attention attributed to this case, this study analyses a previously neglected, yet salient activist strategy known as fraternization that arose during protester-police interactions. We argue that when entrapped in situations marked by confrontational tension with police, protesters strategically attempt to overcome outgroup divisions by getting state forces to sympathize with opposition through fraternization. Utilizing video data analysis (VDA), we assess a sample of 147 publicly available videos featuring protester-police interactions and complement our assessment with semi-structured interviews with protesters. Results reveal that significant levels of fraternization occurred between heterogeneous groups of activists (age, gender, identity) and police. In some cases fraternization attempts contributed to a positive dialogue being established with police, while other attempts had no effect in reducing repression. Although activists were ultimately unsuccessful in convincing police to defect, this inquiry presents new implications for our understanding of the situational dynamics underlying fraternization.

Governing youth in times of dissent: essay competitions, politics of history, and emotions

ABSTRACT This article examines the AKP’s youth politics in the aftermath of the 2013 Gezi Protests. It focuses on a seemingly mundane cultural practice of essay writing and student essay competitions to investigate the party’s message and methods in addressing young people. In particular, it examines the politics of history and emotional politics in the party's effort to construct and administer youth publics. The article argues that the AKP’s power is embedded in and reproduced by the articulation of political differences and mobilization of emotions, which play a significant role in the party’s broader bid to reorganize society, redefine collective identity, and control dissent.

From streets to courthouses: digital and post-digital forms of image activism in the post-occupy Turkey

ABSTRACT Despite the steady growth of authoritarianism, image activism is persistent and vibrant in Turkey. This paper examines how activists/artists used the production and circulation of political images to combat the institutional exclusion of oppositional voices following the Gezi protests (2013) and the attempted coup (2016). Using visual rhetorical analysis of images and in-depth interviews with courtroom painters, the paper focuses on ‘political’ drawings produced in enclaves of courtrooms and the strategies of image activists in visually narrating the political prisoners and/or detainees for wider networks, forming intersectional communities and creating spatial and digital visibility. In the context of the image activism in the post-Occupy Turkey, the passage from the digital to post-digital is based on, first, the top-down restrictive regulations in public and semi-public spaces and increasing police presence in places where activists previously met, and second, rising surveillance of the digital platforms, including the troll armies of the AKP government.

Making a People: Turkey’s “Democracy Watches” and Gezi-Envy

This article investigates a surplus quality that a “politics out of doors” embodies. It argues that forms of mass appearance and protest manifest an aesthetic and affective making of a people—a people that enjoys its togetherness through visualized, vocalized, and performative expressions of its presence. Generating and generated by a collective desire, this figure of a people exceeds “the people” understood as a legally authorizing and legitimating entity. I contend that the excess of desire can make popular protest a source of “envy” for political authorities even at the height of their electoral power. In conversation with Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec’s accounts of “envy” and René Girard’s formulation of “mimetic desire,” I analyze the Turkish regime’s orchestration of the 2016 “Democracy Watches” as an attempt to create, harness, and appropriate a counter-equivalent desire to the 2013 antigovernment Gezi protests. In so doing, I reconceptualize peoplehood as the synergetic enjoyment of assembled collectivities.

From the streets to the mainstream: popularization of Turkish rap music

ABSTRACT Turkish rap music has dominated the scene since 2017. This transformation occurred very quickly. Turkish rap was pioneered by alienated Turkish immigrants in Germany. Initially, it served as a tool for self-expression and dissent from an underground position. Although political rap gained popularity for a short period during the Gezi protests, today’s rappers are turning into influencers rather than protestors and harming rap’s ability of social expression. This research focuses on Turkish rap music’s integration with the current capitalist industries by using the perspectives of both cultural studies and political economy through interviews with industry professionals and historical analysis.

Football in Turkey during the Erdoğan regime

ABSTRACT Since Islamist-conservative Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took over power in Turkey, the country has gone through a massive social transformation. Football, the quintessential form of entertainment in Turkey which has always had its ties with politics, has also been affected by this change. Especially after the Gezi Protests, in which the supporters of three major Istanbul clubs participated, to express their discontent over Erdoğan’s autocratic tendencies and interventions on secular lifestyles, the ruling party’s intervention in football accelerated. The new regime employed heavy policing, a controversial e-ticket scheme, and criminal court cases to suppress dissent in the stadiums, and also sponsored two pro-regime teams of its own that reached success but not popularity. The regime’s every move concerning football has been contested by the middle-class, secular football fans of Istanbul’s pro-opposition neighbourhoods. This paper discusses the historical and sociological origins of Erdoğan’s recurring defeats in the football field versus Stambulite fans.