The articles in The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey: #occupygezi each focus on the mass protests that occurred in Turkey in the summer of 2013, the so-called “Gezi” events—named after the İstanbul park that masses rose up to defend—that consisted of a set of complex protests, forms of action, and mobilization of ideologies and emotions. This volume, edited by Umut Özkırımlı, consists of ten chapters that collectively reflect on the neoliberal authoritarianism and the logic of the securitarian state in Turkey that manifested itself during the Gezi period. Similarly, the volume locates the Gezi movement as a recent example of the anti-globalization struggles of the twenty-first century, thus offering a comparative perspective on this unique social event in recent Turkish history.
“The aim of this collection,” says Özkırımlı in his introduction, “is to offer a preliminary analysis of Gezi protests” (p. 3). He states that the collection infuses a cultural, process-based approach focusing on collectively constructed identities with the macrostructural conditions that produced the protests. He suggests that the implications of the recent events in Turkey are still “far from certain” and will only be fully grasped in time, though he contends that the “Gezi spirit” will put the depoliticized next generation on the road toward a politics of contention (p. 4).
After Özkırımlı’s brief introduction, in the second chapter Soli Özel highlights the common characteristics of contemporary anti-globalization struggles as seen through the prism of political process theory, with an emphasis on the role of the middle classes. From the Arab Spring in Tunisia to young people in the Ukraine desirous of a country en route to the European Union and on to the recent rebellions in Thailand and Brazil, each of these protests, Özel suggests, have taken place during neoliberal transformations that undermine the imaginations of democratic citizenship in twentieth-century nation-states. In particular, he reminds readers that such recent demonstrations have taken place “when politics is suspended in favor of one-size-fits-all policies” (p. 15). Özel frames the Gezi events along similar lines.
In the third chapter, Aslı Iğsız picks up the discussion on authoritarianism in Turkey by addressing the ways the legal structure has been bent and remolded in accordance with the neoliberal rationality of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP). By pointing to the arbitrary laws enacted by the AKP both before and after the Gezi events, she argues that the AKP’s gradually increasing authoritarian tendencies are actually embedded in the rising model of high-security neoliberal nation-states. She traces the origins of this authoritarian state model arising from the post-Washington Consensus climate—which began manifesting itself soon after a set of financial crises gripped much of East Asia and the world in the late 1990s—back to the Cold War period, and connects the party’s arbitrary legal judgments to a “complex transnational system” (pp. 36–37).
This focus on the AKP and the neoliberal Islamic hegemony continues with Cihan Tuğal’s article on the Gülen community in relation to the Gezi events. Tuğal’s discourse analysis begins by pointing to the cracks that appeared within the conservative Islamic hegemonic formation following the abrupt eruption of civil disobedience in early July 2013. In particular, he draws our attention to the “democratic authoritarianism” that has been embedded in Turkish politics since the 1930s, and subsequently he conveys how the dialectical nature of democratic authoritarianism (re)molds the alliance between the AKP, the Gülen community, and liberal intellectuals in Turkey (pp. 57–59). In an intriguing manner, he contends that the statist and nationalist nature of the Gülen community has served as a counterbalancing force to radical political Islam since the 1970s, as well as to “fascistic” tendencies of the AKP that were unearthed by the Gezi movement (p. 61). It would certainly not be wrong to say that Tuğal sheds more light on the Islamic hegemony’s responses to the Gezi events than on the movement itself.
In Chapter 5, Onur Bakıner attributes the sociopolitical polarization and Balkanization of society in the 1990s to the mostly rigid secularist policies initiated during the course of the military intervention of February 28, 1997, and he looks for answers to the question of whether the “Gezi spirit” might be a panacea for the “failures” of the past (p. 66). In Bakıner’s view, “the momentum of Gezi” yielded no political outcome, but will likely produce certain “synergistic effects” that can pave the way for participatory democracy at the everyday level (p. 73).
Whereas Bakıner underlines the polarizing politics of secularist positionality, Michael Ferguson, in the following chapter, calls attention to (then) Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s antagonizing, popular distinction between “White” and “Black” Turks. Working from a historical point of view, he shows how the expression zenci is actually a derogatory term for Afro-Turks living within the Republic of Turkey, despite the fact that it gives leverage to the AKP in contemporary politics (p. 82). Although the author conducts a thorough discourse analysis, this section appears somewhat disconnected from the rest of the book owing to the lack of discussion on the Gezi events themselves.
In Chapter 7, Zeynep Gambetti takes off the telescopic lenses of macrostructural conditions to frame the Gezi events around the politics of the body. Echoing Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri as well as Gilles Deleuze, she underlines the multiple lines of affinity, the plurality of the biographies, and the motivations for protesting within the movement, and she contends that, because of this heterogeneous nature, the set of events that produced Gezi could be better grasped by the body (p. 95). In her view, what unifies this “multiplicity of bodies” is the protest action itself; i.e., physical confrontation with the police (p. 99). The alternative, counter-hegemonic politics generated by the “resisting body,” she says, “could offer an alternative to the […] neoliberal AKP rule” (p. 93).
Along with Gambetti, Emrah Yıldız is also hopeful about such emancipatory politics and new forms of solidarity coming out of the Gezi events. He draws our attention to the intersectional systems of oppression operated by liberal democracy, which have fused politicizing LGBTQ groups with the cause of the Kurdish movement in the context of both the Gezi events and contemporary Turkish politics in general. By pushing the boundaries of the issue of sexuality in the post-imperial spatiotemporality of the Middle East, and making use of Jasbir Puar’s concept of homonationalism, Yıldız posits that the queer politics arising from the Gezi events have the potential to challenge Erdoğan’s conservative, neoliberal discourse, which has been stuck in a female-male binary due to the recent crisis in family structure (p. 114).
In Chapter 9, Ömür Harmanşah focuses on the exhibition called “Hayal-et Yapılar” (Imagine/Ghost Buildings)—held in Taksim in 2011 and funded by the European Capital of Culture Agency—placing the event within the context of the cultural significance of historical sites and places of power. He contends that this exhibition was the source of Erdoğan’s nostalgic yearning for the Topçu Kışlası, the nineteenth-century Ottoman artillery barracks whose planned restitution as a shopping mall complex in Gezi Park sparked the uprising in the first place (p. 128). Harmanşah also links the Gezi movement to a broader ecological struggle manifesting itself through the Anatolian countryside in the form of local ecoprotests against hydroelectric dam projects (pp. 122–123).
In his concluding remarks, Sypros Sofos approaches the Gezi mobilization in a geneaological fashion by pointing to prior experimental ways of protesting, such as the Ankara subway kissing protests that occurred in May 2013. He then emphasizes the common characteristics uniting the anti-globalization struggles of the twenty-first century; namely, the role of social media in mobilizing protesters, non-hierarchical formations that create the future in present, and the precarious educated classes claiming novel forms of agencies and subjectivities in urban spaces (pp. 136–137). Sofos ends his piece by reemphasizing one of the more commonly stated arguments of the collection: the as yet uncertain “political” implications of the movement (p. 138).
Overall, the book offers several approaches to the Gezi events, each of which has the potential to spark debates on the event, as well as on social movements in Turkey in general, by fusing the macrostructural conditions that produced the events with cultural paradigms that enable us to see the micro-level dynamics that arose within the protesting communities. Nevertheless, the discussions and analyses in the volume might have proven more integrated had each author given more sustained attention to one fact: the “anarchistic” character of the newest social movements of the twenty-first century, which transcends the logic of counter-hegemonic struggles and the citizenship imaginations of previous decades. The last four chapters of this volume indeed give us a glimpse of this point of view. However, there remains a disconnect between these final four chapters and the first five chapters, which expose the logic of authoritarian neoliberalism in the context of Turkey and place more emphasis on the hegemony and realpolitik than on the movement itself. Lastly, I would suggest that more articles emphasizing the potency of ecostruggles—which pave the way for cross-cultural solidarities—and a reading of the Gezi events through such an approach could have added more diversity to the volume.
