Spirit Of Gezi Research Articles

Questioning the ‘immortal state’: the Gezi protests and the short-lived human security moment in Turkey

This article has three interrelated objectives: firstly, it challenges monolithic depictions of the 2013 Gezi protests and conceptualizes the so-called ‘Spirit of Gezi’ as a highly influential—albeit temporary—power in the politics of Turkey. Secondly, it traces the success of the HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party) in the 7 June 2015 parliamentary election back to Gezi while acknowledging the roots of the party within the Kurdish political movement. Thirdly, it examines the manifestation and subsequent decline of what is termed the human security moment in Turkey. The arguments of the work are mostly based on interviews with Gezi activists. It is argued that Gezi produced a discursive challenge to the national security-oriented understanding of the ‘Kurdish question’. Yet, even though the human security-oriented Gezi discourse had brought the Kurdish political movement and the Turkish left together, it ultimately failed to permanently transform Turkish politics due to the collapse of the peace process in June 2015. In addition to contributing to the literature on Gezi, the article also draws insights for security studies. It concludes that alternative discourses to the state-centric securitization approach to conflicts such as the Kurdish question can only have a lasting effect under conditions of ceasefire.

The Work of a Few Trees: Gezi, Politics and Space

AbstractIn June 2013, Istanbul and many cities across Turkey became stages of massive demonstrations and occupations, which were sparked by a conflict over Gezi Park in central Istanbul. For many, the ‘park issue' was simply the last straw, and it led to unprecedented revolt, reflecting a huge number of grievances against the government for some, while for others it emphasized the impoverishing consequences of the Justice and Development Party's (AKP's) urban policies. Instead of disentangling causes and effects, we think that a productive way of approaching the oppositional surge that erupted in Gezi Park is through the political work that space does in the context of the increasing prominence of speculation‐driven and authoritarian interventions in urban spaces. Gezi, as an event, not only disrupted the routinized scripts of an increasingly autocratic government and defied the presumed consensus over real‐estate and infrastructure‐led economic growth policies, but also helped to articulate a series of political agendas across the urban–rural continuum that came before it. Even after the occupation, the Gezi spirit continued to politicize space through various de‐localizations. By elaborating on a particular phrase popularized during Gezi, namely yaşam alanı (life space), the article discusses how the riot's political impact deepened and expanded not only through defending a space but also by creating new ones, both materially and conceptually.

The Psychology of the Gezi Spirit

The Psychology of the Gezi Spirit

Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin. By Berna Turam. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+250. $27.95 (paper).

<i>Gaining Freedoms: Claiming Space in Istanbul and Berlin</i>. By Berna Turam. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+250. $27.95 (paper).

The Construction of a New Sociality through Social Media: The Case of the Gezi Uprising in Turkey

Abstract During Turkey’s Gezi Park Protests in the summer of 2013, millions of people became connected as fellow protesters. In the early days of the Gezi movement, the increase in participatory activism through social media made visible the police brutality exercised in the last days of May 2013 against a small group of environmentalists who were protecting Gezi Park from being demolished in order to build a shopping mall. Throughout Turkey’s political history, there has been no other example of this kind of spontaneous mass movement resisting the state apparatus with the large participation of diverse groups and self-convened protesters, without any dominant ideological appeal or leader affiliation. In this article, I will analyze the ways in which these patterns of contradictory interactions formed, evaluated, or triggered various types of social relationships, by critically examining the content of viral images, memes, and widely shared posts by Gezi protesters on social media. In the absence of internal cohesion or an ideological and organizational agenda, I argue that widely shared viral images, memes, and text messages provided the content to collaboratively construct and publicly frame the autonomous logic of the “Gezi spirit” by the Gezi protesters. I aim to analyze this new understanding of collective identity in autonomous logic processed through social media as a being-with (mit-sein), rather than a fusion of the individual to an enigmatic we-ness in order to represent “I”. I claim that this autonomous collectivity is driven by fluidarity as a public experience of the self in relation to the other without intermediary apparatuses and hence can be conceptualized as having built a new sociality.

Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. Selection in the Occupy Gezi Movement.

Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups of activists who subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey suggest that the answer is "yes," pointing to the solidarity exhibited by protesters who previously identified with political groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue, however, that two mechanisms with rather different implications could have generated this observed outcome: "influence," referring to a spontaneous change in attitudes caused by interacting with other movement participants; and "selection," meaning that the individuals who participated in the movement were more likely to be supportive of other groups prior to the event itself. We tease out the relative importance of these two mechanisms in the observed solidarity in Gezi uprising by constructing a panel of over 30,000 Twitter users and analyzing their support for the main Turkish opposition parties before, during, and after the movement. We find that although individuals did change their support over time in significant ways, becoming in general more supportive of the other opposition parties, those who participated in the movement were also significantly more supportive of the other opposition parties all along. Together these findings suggest that both influence and selection were important to generating the observed solidarity among opposition supporters, but that selection was the more important mechanism. We also suggest that while our substantive results are specific to the Gezi uprising our method of ex-post panel construction could be useful to studies of social movements and mass opinion change more generally. In contrast with traditional panel studies, which must be designed and implemented prior to the event of interest occurring, ours can be designed ex-post, and hence can be used to study events such as uprisings that are unanticipated by researchers or are inaccessible for other reasons. We conclude that although social media platforms such as Twitter suffer from a number of well-known limitations, their "always on" nature combined with their widespread availability offer an important source of public opinion data to students of social change.

Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. Selection in the Occupy Gezi Movement

Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups that subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising seem to answer “yes,” pointing to solidarity among groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue that twomechanisms with differing implications may generate this observed outcome: “influence” (change in attitude caused by interacting with other participants); and “selection” (individuals who participated in the movement were generally more supportive of other groups beforehand). We tease out the relative importance of these mechanisms by constructing a panel of over 30,000 Twitter users and analyzing their support for the main Turkish opposition parties before, during, and after the movement. We find that although individuals changed in significant ways, becoming in general more supportive of the other opposition parties, those who participated in the movement were also significantly more supportive of the other parties all along. These findings suggest that both mechanisms were important, but that selection dominated. In addition to our substantive findings, our paper also makes a methodological contribution that we believe could be useful to studies of social movements and mass opinion change more generally. In contrast with traditional panel studies, which must be designed and implemented prior to the event of interest, our method relies on ex post panel construction, and hence can be used to study unanticipated or otherwise inaccessible events. We conclude that despite the well known limitations of social media, their “always on” nature and their widespread availability offer an important source of public opinion data.

The Spirit of Gezi: The Recomposition of Political Subjectivities in Turkey

There is a peculiar affinity between the global uprisings of the last few years--from Tahrir Square, to Syntagma, Zuccotti Park and the Indignados. Not only do these uprisings seem to share similar forms of political protest, they also appear to represent a cycle in which elements are passed over or imitated. In this chain of struggles, every event is also singular, shaped by the respective specificities of its spatio-temporal context. However, those differences, should not be read in an essentialist manner, as if Cairo and New York were incomparable and thus incompatible cases. Instead, we take those differences as different expressions of a common case--an understanding of democracy that challenges the established boundaries between the spheres of the economic, the political and the social. Within this context, the Gezi Uprising, during the summer of 2013 in Turkey--in all its singularity--has something to say about the general patterns of revolts in contemporary capitalism. In this article we aim to provide a theoretically informed account of the Gezi Uprising, which started with a small initiative to prevent the demolition of Gezi Park in the heart of Istanbul, next to Taksim Square, during May 2013 and grew into a nationwide uprising on 31 May 2014. It was an unexpected event, emerging at a point when oppositional forces began to lose hope in the face of the rising authoritarianism of the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi --Justice and Development Party) government. (i) It was 'sudden and puzzling', 'abrupt and spontaneous' for all. (1) According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, two and a half million people took part in the uprising in seventy-nine cities of Turkey. It was undoubtedly the most significant spontaneous uprising in modern Turkish history. Our account gives a glimpse of the immediacy of the uprising based on the participatory observation of the authors (which was limited to its centre, Gezi Park in Istanbul) and also provides a discussion on its background conditions, inner dynamics and transformative nature as well as on the novel and emergent forms of collective political action, affects, language and subjectivity. We do acknowledge the limits of Gezi Uprising's novelties and that the forms we aim to reveal and discuss have not induced social change on a broader scale. They were rather emergent forms, which appeared to sprout during the uprising and weaken afterwards. However, we still think that those emergent forms were important as they signify new potentialities of collective political action and new understandings of democracy that are not bound by the hegemonic forms of politics and representation. One of the common features of the global uprisings was the heterogeneity of the participants. The protests did not only represent the concerns of a particular social group, but typically resonated with the desires of the 'multitude'. (ii) Indeed, resonance and heterogeneity were two important features of the Gezi Uprising as observed by the authors of this article, among many others. (iii) The heterogeneous composition of these events though, is often seen as a sign of their lack of a common ground. Following this argument, a common narrative on the new cycle of uprisings claims that due to the very diversity of their composition, they cannot result in an enduring movement, let alone a political party. We aim to contribute to the broader discussion on the global chain of uprisings through developing an alternative line of argument in the context of the Gezi case. We conceive these elements of heterogeneity and resonance as the conceptual infrastructures of a new virtual political subjectivity, which we analyse with the concept of recomposition. By using the concept of recomposition, we shift the emphasis 'from identity to becoming'. (2) Our analysis does not see the heterogeneity of the protestors as a weakness; on the contrary, we see it as a window of opportunity in the sense that Lefebvre defined the revolutionary moment as 'the spontaneous coming together in a moment of 'irruption; when disparate heterotopic groups suddenly see, if only for a fleeting moment, the possibilities of collective action to create something radically different'. …

ISTANBUL’S TAKSIM SQUARE AND GEZI PARK: THE PLACE OF PROTEST AND THE IDEOLOGY OF PLACE

May 2013 saw Istanbul witness a massive public demonstration. The incident began on 28 May when a small group of environmental activists tried to save Gezi Park, one of the most iconic green spaces in the Taksim district of central Istanbul. The park dates back to the 1940s and is well-known as public promenade. The modest demonstration was triggered by a government decision to reconstruct a former Ottoman Artillery Barracks. Within a few days, it developed into a violent uprising on an unprecedented scale lasting almost an entire month. Crowds not only gathered in Istanbul but also in many other Turkish cities such as the capital, Ankara. International media broadcast the protests live from Taksim Square turning the Gezi Park protest into an international phenomenon. Today the Park has become a reference point in Turkish politics where almost every issue is linked to the ‘spirit of Gezi’. It made a modest protest over an inner city promenade into a vivid symbol of political opposition. This paper will analyse historically the Taksim Square project and the ideological conflicts it evoked in Turkish society.

The Understanding of a Social Movement: The Gezi Park Protests in the Eyes of the Media

The Park protests have left a mark in the social history of Turkey, and these effects still are being debated. The nationwide demonstrations have distinct characteristics spontaneous, universal and beyond class. Since May 31 when the Gezi began, the existing paradigms of social relations in Turkey have been transformed. Different groups of society who attached their political subjectivities to in varying ways have launched a against the authoritarian approaches of the AKP(Justice and Development Party) in general and Prime Minister Erdogan in particular. Many groups have called for a collective mobilization against the government for the overthrow of the existing political status quo, turning to a Gezi spirit expressing a yearning for some revolution. A huge variety of groups including Turkish nationalists, far-right extremists, leftists, secularists and anti-capitalist Muslims gathered under the heading of this Gezi In the period of the resistance, the mainstream media becoming a tool of the ruling party has used the same language and headlines. Activists claimed that the mainstream media covered the struggle against government forces from a manipulative or fact-distorting point of view. The resistance has created its own public spaces and media. At this point, whatishappenninginistanbul.com and istanbuldaneoluyor.com have been published as platforms for sharing the confirmed information gathered from citizen journalists with the principle of proclaiming the fact that the resistance has continued with determination. The websites compile texts, photos and videos and also has given access to featured content from Facebook and Twitter about the resistance. In this study, it has been discussed the narrative frameworks and the silence of mainstream news media on Park protests. In addition, it has been focused on the process of creating its own media of resistance.