REJECTING DISOBEDIENCE: CONTESTING “ILLEGALITY” AND CREATING NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE

As William Scheuerman (Reference Scheuerman2015) observes, “contemporary thinking about civil disobedience typically begins by targeting the now (allegedly) hegemonic liberal model first formulated in the 1960s and ‘70s” (436). Turning to Rawls and, as Scheuerman suggests, overstating his centrality in the conceptual development of civil disobedience, most critics formulate their alternative accounts through a critical engagement with Rawls’s definition of the term. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls famously defines civil disobedience as “a public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law, usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of government” (Rawls Reference Rawls1999, 364). Civil disobedients, he argues, must break the law by appealing to “the sense of justice of the majority of the community” and act “within the limits of fidelity to law” by demonstrating their willingness to accept the legal consequences of their conduct (364).

Despite its enormous popularity in both academic circles and political culture, “virtually all aspects of this definition” (Celikates Reference Celikates2016b, 983) have been challenged by critics. While their criticisms differ, these scholars agree that there is a misfit between this rigid liberal conception of civil disobedience and the “empirical realities of political protest” today (Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2022, 982; see also Delmas Reference Delmas2016, 685). Robin Celikates argues that this misfit calls for a broadened conception of civil disobedience. For while he is troubled by the mobilization of “idealized instances of civil disobedience from the past (Gandhi, King)” to discredit contemporary protests (Celikates Reference Celikates2018, 71), he also finds it politically irresponsible to abandon a concept that offers activists a protective cover from state institutions (Celikates Reference Celikates2016a, 43). To broaden the conception of civil disobedience, Celikates highlights the limitations of the standard account, such as Rawls’s unrealistic requirements that to be considered civil disobedients, the protesters must inform the authorities of their planned activities, appeal to the majority’s sense of justice, and act within the limits of “fidelity to law”—a requirement which, in Celikates’s reading, implies that the protesters must be committed to the legal order “as it exists” (Celikates Reference Celikates2016b, 990). But perhaps Celikates’s most provocative objection targets, up until recently, the least debated aspect of Rawls’s definition, namely his claim that civil disobedience is nonviolent. Footnote ³ Celikates’s point here is not that civil disobedience can be violent; it is rather that what constitutes a “nonviolent” act is largely shaped by “how violence is socially, politically, and legally (re-)defined” (Celikates Reference Celikates2016a, 42). Making nonviolence a part of the definition of civil disobedience without paying attention to its “ambivalent” nature, he argues, side-steps how the distinction between violence and nonviolence is politically instrumentalized (42). Those who incorporate nonviolence into their accounts of civil disobedience ignore that what constitutes a (non)violent act is itself a matter of political contestation. In light of these criticisms, Celikates calls for a “less normatively demanding and therefore less restrictive” account that defines civil disobedience as:

Celikates’s (Reference Celikates2016a) stipulation that the “civil” in civil disobedience refers to any action that follows “a political and not a military logic” (43) significantly expands the meaning of the term “civil.” For Delmas, this aspect of Celikates’s definition stretches his conception of civil disobedience “beyond recognition” (Delmas Reference Delmas2018, 37). Such an account, Delmas argues, can help the commentators claim that many different forms of dissent, ranging from riots to DDoS attacks orchestrated by groups such as Anonymous, are acts of civil disobedience. Yet, whether the public finds such a claim convincing remains an open question—one that matters because, as Delmas notes, if the public is skeptical, labeling such acts as civil disobedience can hardly confer legitimacy on activists’ actions.

For Delmas, there is another reason why broadening the conception of civil disobedience is problematic: those who expand the scope of civil disobedience fail to see that for many activists the point is “to refuse to follow the standard script of civil disobedience” (Delmas Reference Delmas2018, 38). Activists may intentionally reject civil disobedience, for instance, because it is not accessible to them as a form of resistance, as in the case of incarcerated persons, or because they seek to expose “the falseness of the presumption of equal standing within the standard conception of civil disobedience” (39). Under these circumstances, insisting that activists who participate in hunger strikes, riots, sabotage, and so forth are engaging in civil disobedience ignores the protesters’ strategic decisions regarding the form of resistance they choose.

Given these concerns, Delmas argues that rather than trying to confer legitimacy to activists by stretching the conception of civil disobedience, it is theoretically more productive to accept that there are acts of uncivil disobedience, that is acts of resistance that may, unlike civil disobedience, be “covert, evasive, anonymous, more than minimally destructive, or deliberately offensive” (44), which may nonetheless be justifiable under certain circumstances. According to this account, any protest that displays one or more of the traits listed earlier is “generally uncivil” (44) yet potentially justifiable.Footnote ⁴

Delmas raises a crucial concern when she argues that accounts that expand the conception of civil disobedience to cover an ever-lengthening list of different forms of protest both lose phenomenological accuracy and erase the protesters’ self-understanding of their actions.Footnote ⁵ I argue that a similar point can be made about the current tendency to broaden the conception of disobedience to discuss different forms of dissent. For indeed, in certain forms of protest, whether or not the activists are engaging in actions that involve law-breaking is contested. Surely, some of the examples listed by scholars of disobedience are rather straightforward cases. When activists blow a pipeline, engage in breaking and entering in animal rescue operations, or leak the personal data of officials, both the activists and the public agree that the protest in question is in violation of existing law. In other cases, however, things are not as clear-cut.

There are, for instance, certain acts of resistance listed by these authors as examples of disobedience even though, conceptually speaking, it is unclear as to why they constitute a “deliberate breach of law” (Delmas Reference Delmas2018, 42). Consider the case of hunger strikes.Footnote ⁶ For Delmas, “principled disobedience,” which may be civil or uncivil, involves “unlawful acts of resistance” that are “politically or morally motivated resorts to illegality in the opposition or refusal to conform to the system’s dominant norms” (Delmas Reference Delmas2018, 42). Based on this definition, Delmas lists hunger strikes as one of her examples of uncivil disobedience. Hunger strikes are uncivil, for Delmas, because “they are evasive and coercive, involving a threat of suicide”; they are acts of disobedience because they involve “the deliberate or repeated defiance of official orders” (Delmas Reference Delmas2018, 45).

However, the legal status of protest activities that involve self-harm, such as self-immolation, hunger strikes, or the lip-sewing practiced frequently in immigrant detention centers, is a more complicated issue than what Delmas seems to suggest. Delmas is surely correct in that authorities try to prevent activists from engaging in these forms of protest in various ways, including the issuance of official bans as frequently done in prisons/detention centers. Even with such bans, however, the “illegality” of these acts of resistance is not a settled matter. The supposed illegality of hunger strikes is particularly contested. Perhaps in recognition of this fact, while discussing hunger strikes in A Duty to Resist, Delmas expands her definition of principled disobedience from a politically or morally motivated decision to resort to “illegality” to the “deliberate or repeated defiance of official orders” (Delmas Reference Delmas2018, 45). In doing so, she both broadens the meaning of disobedience from engaging in an act contrary to law, as Rawls puts it, to general defiance of authority, and ignores the fact that the legality of these official orders is frequently challenged by activists who argue that it is the authorities—not they—who are violating the law.

In a recent article, where she develops a new defense for “the right to hunger strike,” Delmas acknowledges the complexity of the matter and engages with the legal challenges presented by activists/rights advocates. In this piece, she avoids describing hunger strikes as “uncivil disobedience” (Delmas Reference Delmas2024, 857). Still, Delmas objects to those who associate this resistance tactic with “Gandhian nonviolence and civil disobedience” (850). “[T]he right to hunger strike should not be premised on the tactic’s peaceful (noncoercive and nonviolent) nature,” she argues, because as a case of “self-destructive resistance,” a hunger strike is a violent act and “to threaten to starve oneself for the purposes of constraining or exerting pressure on a target is coercive” (850). Crucially, Delmas emphasizes that neither its violent nature nor its coerciveness makes hunger strikes morally wrong; the strength of her position rests on the claim that incarcerated persons have a right to hunger strike even though it is a violent and coercive form of protest.

For Delmas, argumentative strategies deployed by activists and lawyers that present “the repression of hunger strikers as a violation of freedom of speech” remain “inadequate” (Delmas Reference Delmas2024, 848). Instead of insisting that hunger strikes are nonviolent and noncoercive, Delmas proposes that we should accept that hunger strikes are coercive and violent while making a case against prison authorities’ attempt to use the violent and coercive nature of hunger strikes as a justification to repress the practice. This is, as Delmas writes, what the authorities did at Pelican Bay State Prison in 2013 when they “charged hunger strikers with ‘willfully delaying peace officer by participating in a mass hunger strike,’ in violation of the California Code of Regulations (15 §3005(a)): ‘Inmates and parolees shall obey all laws, regulations, and local procedures, and refrain from behavior which might lead to violence or disorder, or otherwise endangers facility, outside community or another person’” (849).

Delmas does not discuss in her article how this charge was challenged in court by one of the hunger strikers, Jorge A. Gomez, who argued that “the prison had violated his constitutional right to freedom of speech by punishing him for ‘hunger striking in a peaceful manner’” (In re Jorge A. Gomez [1st App. Dist., 2016] 246 Cal. App. 4th 1082)—a legal strategy that proved to be effective in this case. In an opinion filed on March 25, 2016, the California Court of Appeals First Appellate District stated that the contention of the prison authorities that Gomez contributed to “significant disruptions” to the functioning of the institution does not indicate that “there was a breakdown of order in any aspect of the prison” nor that “the protest involved any violence or disorderly conduct.” Accordingly, the court ruled that Gomez’s participation in the hunger strike did not constitute a rule violation.

Undoubtedly, a different court could have sided with the prison authorities. This fact, however, does not undermine the political significance of this case: Gomez challenged the authorities’ claim that a hunger strike is unlawful since it “might lead to violence and disorder” by arguing that not only that his actions did not endanger any other person but also that hunger striking in a peaceful manner is protected by the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Gomez’s defense deployed an alternative interpretation of the law that contested the officials’ interpretation of it; countering the officials’ attempt to reduce law to only sovereign command, Gomez appealed to the law’s normative content as a source of rights. As Jules Lobel, drawing on Cover, argues, litigations such as this one are important not because their success is guaranteed—many of them fail—but because, as instances of jurisgenesis, they bring to the public’s attention “an alternative vision of justice” that “allows law to move towards an imagined ideal” (Lobel Reference Lobel1995, 1333).

Gomez’s defense is also significant because the success of this interpretive claim was determined by the struggle over what constitutes a “violent” and “disruptive” act. Put differently, it was the “essentially contested” character of legal precepts (Cover Reference Cover1983, 17) that enabled Gomez to challenge the official’s implementation of the law, opening space for an oppressed community, namely, the incarcerated persons, “to develop ways to maintain its own vision of law” (Lobel Reference Lobel1995, 1351). Understood this way, Gomez’s alternative interpretation of the law is at the same time a “narrative of resistance” that may become a resource “in the struggles of other… communities for decades and generations to come” (1388).

I suggest that Delmas risks losing sight of such narratives of resistance when she adopts the perspective of the prison authorities to claim that hunger strikes are indeed violent and coercive. This is the case despite the fact that Delmas’s goal is to challenge authorities’ attempts to repress hunger strikers (Delmas Reference Delmas2024, 854), In her effort to ground the right to hunger strike on the moral right to seek redress, Delmas overlooks the political significance of the dispute over the question of whose actions are to be considered illegal—the officials who forcefully suppress hunger strikes or the protesters? Claiming that hunger striking is, by definition, disobedience, or a violent and coercive act of resistance that is nonetheless morally justifiable, she ends up erasing both the ongoing political contestation and the activists’ alternative legal visions from her account. Delmas is not alone in enacting such an erasure; in fact, on this point, she is closely following Rawls’s lead.

While discussing civil disobedience, Rawls acknowledges that often there is “some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ actions will be held illegal or not” (Rawls Reference Rawls1999, 365). Yet, he dismisses the significance of this ambivalence by stating that “this is merely a complicating matter”; after all, he suggests, the protesters would continue their actions even if the courts were to find their actions illegal (365). Contemporary scholars of disobedience unquestioningly adopt this aspect of Rawls’s account of civil disobedience while challenging all other aspects of it. Contestation over what constitutes an illegal act is hardly “merely a complicating matter,” however, when the protesters’ refusal to accept the alleged illegality of their actions is central to their claim-making. Accounts that insist on calling these protesters disobedients, even as the protesters themselves openly reject the disobedience framework, distort the protesters’ claims. In their well-intentioned effort to offer a protective cover to the protesters, these commentators adopt the state’s view of the law and silence activists’ narratives of resistance, which draw on law’s normative content to move the meaning of the existing law toward an alternative vision of justice.

Celikates’s comments regarding the contested nature of the meaning of violence are helpful in highlighting what is at stake in this contestation over legality. Those who incorporate “illegality” into their accounts of disobedience without acknowledging the essentially contested character of legal precepts overlook that in certain instances what constitutes an (il)legal act is itself a matter of political contestation. The issue here is not limited to acts of protest that involve self-harm or other contested practices, such as politically motivated occupations of derelict buildings; the contestation over the meaning of legality is equally relevant to street protests. After all, the meaning of peaceable assembly is continually contested both by authorities, who seek to suppress dissent, and by protesters who challenge them, especially in contexts where the right to protest is being increasingly restricted.

To illustrate this point and explore why activists may choose to reject the disobedience framework in such contexts, the following sections turn to the contemporary feminist movement’s confrontation with state authorities in Turkey. In what follows, I will first discuss how the bounds of “legal protest” have contracted in Turkey since 2013. Then, turning to the websites, press releases, social media posts of various feminist organizations, and court hearings of activists on trial, I will examine how feminist protests in Turkey challenge the regime’s efforts to limit the right to protest and expose the state’s failure to fulfill its legal obligations to its citizens. As will be demonstrated, the feminist activists discussed in this article do not characterize themselves as disobedients who intentionally break the law to highlight an injustice. Instead, insisting on the legality of their actions, they posit themselves as equal citizens authorized to interpret the law and resist the government’s attempt to reduce law (hukuk) to mere sovereign command (kanun). In so doing, they participate in the creation of legal meaning, jurisgenesis.

LEGAL CONTESTATION IN AN INCREASINGLY AUTHORITARIAN CONTEXT: THE STRUGGLE OVER THE RIGHT TO PROTEST IN TURKEY

While the right to peaceful protest has been under constitutional guarantee for over a century in Turkey (Şirin Reference Şirin2013, 290), the exercise of the right has never been fully protected within the current legal framework that was established by the junta regime of 1980–83. Article 34 of the Constitution states that everyone has a right to organize peaceful protests “without prior permission.” The right to peaceful assembly, however, can be limited under certain circumstances. Article 34 provides an ambiguous list of what these circumstances might be; it states that: “The right to hold meetings and demonstration marches shall be restricted only by law on the grounds of national security, public order, prevention of commission of crime, protection of public health and public morals or the rights and freedoms of others” (Constitution of the Turkish Republic, Article 34).Footnote ⁷

The law that regulates the right to protest, Law 2911 (Law on Assembly and Demonstrations), was legislated in 1983 during the military rule. As legal scholars agree, restrictive elements of the law suggest that it was designed to curtail the right to assembly (Altıparmak Reference Altıparmak2013; Şirin Reference Şirin2013, 291). While a series of reforms moderated the law during the EU accession process in the early 2000s, Law 2911 still includes “spatial and temporal restrictions on the use of the right to protest and gives [local administrators] extensive powers to restrict, suspend, or ban protests” (Arslanalp and Erkmen Reference Arslanalp and Erkmen2020b, 105). These powers were extended in 2018. In July of that year, President Erdoğan ended the ongoing state of emergency, which was declared following the coup attempt in July 2016, as the parliament passed amendments to Law 2911 and Law 5442 (Provincial Administration Law, İl Idaresi Kanunu) that integrated parts of the State of Emergency Law into ordinary law. These amendments give governors, who are appointed administrators, the capacity to “control the mobility of people in public areas” for the purposes of preventing what the law ambiguously defines as “disruptions and future disruptions to public order and security”; the amendments also put time limits on protests, requiring the protesters to request an extension from governors to allow demonstrations to continue past sunset (117).

As Mert Arslanalp and Deniz Erkmen (Reference Arslanalp and Erkmen2020a) argue, this restrictive legal framework provided the AKP regime with legal tools to intensify its crackdown on the right to protest and to establish what these authors aptly call a “mobile emergency rule,” which refers to the “temporary and localized practice of suspending or limiting constitutional rights via administrative orders in the name of public order without enacting a total suspension” (948). Mobile emergency rule uses legal ambiguities and procedural technicalities to open space for the discretionary exercise of sovereign power. In so doing, it institutes a juridical order that normalizes “lawful lawlessness”—to adopt a phrase that Ayten Gündoğdu (Reference Gündoğdu, Shachar and Benhabib2025) uses to discuss the routinized violation of the principle of equality before the law through the manipulation of jurisdiction in the contemporary immigration context (177). Rather than suspending the right to protest, the regime, by incorporating the State of Emergency Law into ordinary law, has granted the administrative authorities discretionary powers to disperse any protest activity on the grounds of public security. In a perfect enactment of “lawful lawlessness,” appointed officials (governors, district heads, rectors, and public prosecutors) frequently invoke their duty to secure law and order to issue temporary and localized bans and/or impose restrictions (such as preventing access to protest sites by closing off metro stations), thereby limiting protest activity based on broad interpretations of the existing law.

This discretionary exercise of sovereign power has been frequently “contested, resisted, and negotiated” (Arslanalp and Erkmen Reference Arslanalp and Erkmen2022, 929) both on the ground and in the courts. For instance, local authorities frequently interpret Article 10 of Law 2911, which requires protesters to “inform authorities” of planned protests, as “a requirement to get permission” and cite “lack of prior permission” as a pretext for disproportionate police response. Rights advocates/activists contest this interpretation. Participating in the creation of legal meaning, they argue that official declarations regarding Law 2911 contradict Article 34 of the Constitution, which states that everyone has a right to protest “without prior permission” (Altıparmak Reference Altıparmak2013; Şirin Reference Şirin2013, 293–4).Footnote ⁸

To circumvent activists’ legal challenges, officials announce protest bans shortly before the protests, constraining activists’ ability to file judicial appeals ahead of the planned event. Nor are the courts always sympathetic to protesters’ challenges; in fact, given how much the AKP regime has eroded judicial independence over the last decade (Özbudun Reference Özbudun2015), it is surprising that the courts occasionally decide in favor of the protesters.Footnote ⁹ Despite these limitations of the legal field, protesters continue to contest the legality of administrative bans not because there is any guarantee that the courts will decide in their favor but because such legal contestations are part of a narrative of resistance that exposes to the public the regime’s assault on the rule of law and the right to protest.

These legal contestations are especially important, given that by limiting protests through the deployment of the law (kanun), the AKP government also seeks to control the public narrative surrounding the legitimacy of both the regime and the protests. In a move reminiscent of how the fascist state retained the appearance of a functioning legal system while divorcing law from its rational form and content (Neumann [1947] Reference Neumann2009, 440–58), the AKP regime presents these discretionary administrative bans as “legal” acts to maintain the veneer of the rule of law while simultaneously stripping law of both its generality and subjective rights, reducing it to mere sovereign command. By describing the protesters as lawbreakers, the regime also seeks to delegitimize their protests. Engaging in jurisgenesis, activists counter this official account with a narrative that offers an alternative interpretation of Law 2911 based on their readings of the constitutional guarantees of the right to protest and the rule of law to make a case for the legality of their protests and the lawlessness (hukuksuzluk) of the official bans.Footnote ¹⁰ Politically, this narrative confronts the government’s public campaign of delegitimation by highlighting how these last-minute arbitrary bans undermine the rule of law, which “requires state officials to act in a relatively consistent, predictable, and transparent fashion” (Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2015, 443). Strategically, these arguments provide a legal defense to activists, who face possible prison sentences for violating Law 2911.

INTERPRETING THE LAW FROM BELOW: FEMINIST PROTESTS AND THE MILITANT POLITICS OF LEGALITY

The feminist movement’s struggle against the regime’s efforts to criminalize protests constitutes a striking illustration of this ongoing contestation over the meaning of law and what counts as an illegal protest.Footnote ¹¹ While the AKP regime has intensified its restrictions on protests in recent years, the feminist movement has continued to stage massive demonstrations. The March 8 Feminist Night March is especially important in this regard. The first Feminist Night March dates to 2003 when feminists decided to meet at night on Istiklal Street to stage a protest that could bring together all women with (or without) any organizational affiliation (Akdemir Reference Akdemir2022; Çaylı Rahte and Tokdoğan Reference Çaylı Rahte and Tokdoğan2014). Since then, each march has been organized by a committee whose members change every year and come from different feminist groups. The organizing committee publicizes the event, coordinates the participation of protesters, communicates with the authorities informing them of the event as required by Law 2911, and issues a press release on the day of the march.

The number of participants in the Feminist Night March has steadily increased over the years. The 2013 Gezi Protests, in which feminist organizations played a major role, contributed to the growing visibility of the march. Along with the Istanbul Pride March, the Feminist Night March became one of the venues where the legacy of Gezi as an ideologically diverse resistance movement continued to live. In 2013 and 2014, each of these demonstrations took thousands to Istiklal Street. The AKP regime’s initial response was to ban the Pride March, starting in 2015, through ordinances issued by appointed officials. The declaration of a state of emergency after July 2016’s coup attempt enabled the regime to further curtail the right to protest. Despite the increased levels of repression, in 2017, during the first year of the emergency rule, more than 40,000 women filled the streets in the Taksim area for the Feminist Night March. The following year, the protesters, whose path was blocked by a police barricade, altered the direction of the march. Since 2019, all marches organized by feminists in the Taksim area have been targeted by protest bans, issued by the Beyoğlu District governorship shortly before the events. The texts of these bans state that the location of the protest is unsuitable for demonstrations, asserting that large protests in Istanbul can only be held in two designated gathering zones located in Yenikapi and Maltepe. Referring to Law 2911, the authorities ground the suspension of the right to assembly on the claim that the protests may provoke other groups and thereby risk undermining public order.

The legality of these arguments has been challenged by activists who push back against these bans. For instance, “when the Beyoğlu district authorities in Istanbul banned the planned women’s march on 25 November 2019, … persistent demands on the part of the organizations led to the withdrawal of the ban” (Arslanalp and Erkmen Reference Arslanalp and Erkmen2022, 929). Still, the authorities imposed spatial restrictions by closing off large sections of Istiklal Street. Protesters marching beyond the designated area were confronted by police who used disproportionate force to disperse the protest, which they now deemed “unlawful.” Starting in 2020, these localized, temporary, and targeted bans have been accompanied by restrictions imposed by the Istanbul governorship on public transportation to prevent access to Taksim.

Since 2019, when the Feminist Night March was first banned, activists defied each of these protest bans, which they claimed to be arbitrary and unlawful (hukuksuz). On March 8, 2022, for instance, following the Beyoğlu District governorship’s announcement to ban the Feminist Night March, the Association for Monitoring Equal Rights challenged the authorities’ interpretation of Law 2911. After tweeting the text of Article 34 of the Constitution, they stated: “Despite this clear constitutional provision, administrative authorities’ decision to ban the protests and to require prior permission is unlawful (hukuksuzdur)” (@esithaklar, March 8, 2022). Despite numerous obstacles imposed by the authorities, including heavy police presence, blocked streets, and closed metro stations, during the last 5 years, activists continued to march around the Taksim area.

Authorities have targeted protesters in other ways as well. In 2021, for instance, 17 women who participated in protests were taken into custody 2 days after the march through a police operation conducted in the early hours of the day. These protesters were later charged with violating Law 2911 by not dispersing after the police announcement and with disparaging the presidency by participating in the performance of the slogans, “Tayyip run run women are coming” (“Tayyip Kaç Kadınlar Geliyor”) and “Jump jump, those who don’t are Tayyip” (“Zıpla zıpla, zıplamayan Tayyip’tir”), by “jumping to the rhythm of the slogan that was being chanted” (Akgül Reference Akgül2022). In the court hearings, protesters both defended themselves by insisting on the legality of their actions and participated in the creation of legal meaning, by challenging officials’ interpretation of Law 2911 and appealing to constitutional principles.

For instance, one defendant stated: “I don’t remember if I participated in the slogans listed in the indictment, but I also don’t think that the slogans in question involve an element of crime… I exercised my constitutional right. I demand my acquittal” (Cumhuriyet 2022). Other defendants challenged the prosecution’s claim that the defendants disobeyed the police announcement to disperse. One of them, referring directly to Articles 23 and 24 of Law 2911, which gives a list of conditions that would require the police to make an announcement to disperse, argued that the “police did not make an announcement to disperse because the conditions requiring such an announcement were not met.”

According to the defendants’ narrative, these unfounded charges were a part of the authorities’ ongoing effort to reduce law to a mere means of control, instrumentalized by the government to intimidate activists. During the hearing that was held on March 1, 2022, a defendant pointed to the government’s instrumentalization of law (kanun) to intimidate dissent by stating that “the reason why I, along with my co-defendants, am here today is to prevent the possibility that the number of those who will participate in the Feminist Night March next week increase from 30,000 to 50,000 women.” Others echoed this point and highlighted the double standard in the state’s willingness to charge peacefully protesting women, who were simply exercising their rights, for breaking the law, while state officials frequently failed to enforce the Law to Protect the Family and Prevent Violence against Women (Law 6284) to save women’s lives: “I am saddened that when violent assailants targeting women are walking the streets freely,” one of the defendants claimed, “we are being charged here for a crime that does not exist” (Cumhuriyet 2022). After 8 hearings over the course of 2 years, on September 28, 2023, all the defendants, who insisted in their final statements that it was unlawful (hukuksuz) that they were put on trial for participating in the Feminist Night March, were acquitted of all charges (Bianet 2023).

Such legal arguments are never merely strategic moves; they are, at the same time, political claims. The activists use the publicity afforded to them in the courtroom to demonstrate not only that they are not lawbreakers, but also that it is actually the authorities who are undermining law (hukuk) by instrumentalizing the existing law (kanun) to crush dissent. As Lobel (Reference Lobel1995) suggests, even in losing cases, articulations of such alternative interpretations of law can be used to galvanize public support and become a part of the “oppressed community’s legal vision and aspirations” (1348). The following ongoing case illustrates this point.

In 2022, 40 activists from the Woman Defense Network (Kadın Savunma Ağı), a feminist organization that was formed in 2019 to address violence against women, were prevented from attending the 20th Feminist Night March. Activists were taken into custody at Kadıköy Ferry Pier before ever making it to Taksim, which is on the other side of the Bosporus Strait. In a press release posted on their website shortly after the activists were indicted for violating Law 2911, the Woman Defense Network stated, “Participating in the March 8 marches is not against the law; it is a fundamental right” (Kadin Savunma Ağı 2022). They also charged the authorities both for “usurping” the activists’ rights to peaceful protest and freedom of movement, and for inventing “crimes” in their indictments, including the absurd claims that slogans such as “Let’s Create a Feminist World” and “We Want a World without Bosses and Pimps” contained criminal elements. “We are not surprised,” the activists declared in an allusion to Law 6284, that those “who do not enforce the laws that are legislated to protect women” would usurp these constitutional rights. Indeed, the press release emphasized that it was the authorities, not the activists, who were on the wrong side of the existing law: “it is not our friends, who were unfairly taken into custody,” the statement reads “but those, who turn a blind eye to the plight of women, trans people, and children who are subjected to violence every single day in this country; those who release their murderers, and those who withdrew from Istanbul Convention, are the guilty ones” (Kadın Savunma Aǧı 2022).

Before the trial of these activists concluded, another group challenged the legality of the authorities’ decision to ban the 20th Feminist Night March on the grounds of potential disturbances to social peace. On March 22, 2024, the 10th Administrative Chamber of the Istanbul Regional Court of Justice ruled that the administrative order to ban the march was a violation of the right to assembly (Akgül Reference Akgül2024). According to the ruling, insofar as it failed to demonstrate a necessary social need, the ban was a “disproportionate and excessive measure” that was against the law. The court also noted that it was unacceptable for the Istanbul governorship to issue a blanket ban rendering protests in the Taksim area unlawful on the grounds that large protests in Istanbul can only be held in designated gathering zones; after all, the court concluded, “Considering the definition, purpose, and nature of the right to organize…demonstration marches, one of the elements of this right is the freedom to choose the venue or route for the meeting or demonstration” (Akgül Reference Akgül2024).

This decision did not prevent the authorities from issuing a similar ban targeting the Feminist Night March in 2025. Still, for the activists, the court’s decision is a political and strategic win: politically, it confirms, in the public eye, the activists’ point that it is the state, not the activists, who are breaking the law in banning protests; strategically, it provides those activists who are taken into custody for violating Law 2911 with the legal defense that the bans issued by the authorities are lawless (hukuksuz).

As these examples demonstrate, while they openly and publicly defy the protest bans, feminists refuse to follow, to use Delmas’s phrase, “the standard script” of disobedience (Delmas Reference Delmas2018, 38). Rather than characterizing their actions as those of disobedients who intentionally break the law to highlight an injustice, feminist activists offer a narrative of resistance that makes a case for the legality of their actions by appealing to law (hukuk) and the constitutional guarantees of the rule of law (hukuk devleti) and the right to protest to contest the authorities’ interpretations of the existing laws which reduces them to simply sovereign command (kanun).

This is not to suggest that civil disobedients do not appeal to law. On the contrary, as Scheuerman rightly suggests, in their attempt to show that Rawls’s emphasis on “fidelity to law” implies a status quo bias, contemporary critics such as Celikates fail to appreciate that none other than Martin Luther King had a “dynamic and forward-looking” commitment to law (Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2015, 432). While he had no illusions regarding the racist underpinnings of the existing legal system, Scheuerman convincingly argues that King believed “appeals to the law, when properly tied to militant protests exemplifying respect for the law, could play a decisive role in spawning radical reform” (443). The militant protests in question involved activists “break[ing] an unjust law,” to use King’s words, “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty” (King [1964] Reference King2000, 95). The feminist activists in Turkey share King’s commitment to the ideal of law-based government and agree with his insights regarding the nexus between law and radical change. Still, they reject the disobedience framework: the form of resistance that these activists choose, which also carries the risk of police violence and legal prosecution, is defined by a refusal to accept the authorities’ interpretations of the law that cast them as intentional lawbreakers. Why?

As we have seen, the temporary and localized bans that are based on broad interpretations of the law do not only aim to prevent a specific protest activity, limit the visibility of the protests, and ensure that the activists’ demands remain unheard by the broader public. The creation of this juridical order that embodies a form of “lawful lawlessness” (Gündoğdu Reference Gündoğdu, Shachar and Benhabib2025) also serves as an instrument in the regime’s toolbox to render street protests as “undemocratic acts that do not fall within the rule of law, and protesters as ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandits’” (Arslanalp and Erkmen Reference Arslanalp and Erkmen2022, 922). Consider the following statement delivered by Erdoğan shortly after the Gezi protests:

Protest bans issued by local administrators give a legal veneer to this attempt to contain democratic politics within the narrow confines of elections and to delegitimize street protests while stripping law of its normative content of subjective rights, thereby reducing hukuk to kanun—that is, “only voluntas… the political command of the sovereign” (Neumann [1947] Reference Neumann2009, 368). By emphasizing that the bans are unlawful use of executive power because they are excessive, unpredictable, and arbitrary, and by challenging the legality of the interpretive reasoning offered by the administrators, protesters both direct the public’s attention to how the regime is undermining the rule of law and participate in jurisgenesis. This militant politics of legality transforms the law into a site of contestation; by claiming the authority to interpret the law in their capacity as equal citizens, activists not only challenge the regime’s claim to be the sole arbiter of legality but also stand up against its attempt to reduce law simply to a sovereign command to which one has no option other than to obey or disobey. In so doing, they form a dynamic and forward-looking interpretive relationship with the law, which rejects its instrumentalization by the regime, to reclaim the law (hukuk) as a source of rights and mobilize it as a means of potential restraint on the discretionary use of sovereign power.

“WE DO NOT OBEY!”: ACTING AS CO-AUTHORS OF LAW AND DEFYING PATRIARCHAL AUTHORITY

While the feminist movement in Turkey is composed of diverse constituents with significant disagreements, making what Siegel (Reference Siegel2001) calls “interpretive and amendatory” legal claims (300) has historically been central to the movement. Starting in the 1980s, feminist activists “prioritized amendment of the legal codes” (Arat Reference Arat2016, 129). They first targeted the Civil Code, which recognized the husband as the “head” of the household, legalizing the hierarchical relation between man and woman in the family, and then called for a change in the Penal Code, which, they argued, provided legal backing to patriarchal domination that made the female body “a target of male aggression and assault” (Tekeli Reference Tekeli2010, 121). After years of struggle, the movement achieved numerous legislative successes between the 2000s and early 2010s, including progressive amendments to the Civil Code in 2001, a new Penal Code in 2004, and, most significantly, the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which was incorporated into domestic law with the passing of the Law on the Protection of the Family and Prevention of Violence against Women, Law 6284, in 2012 (Acar and Altunok Reference Acar and Altunok2013, 18).Footnote ¹²

After the success of their amendatory claims that resulted in new and/or improved laws, feminists directed their attention to the officials’ interpretation/implementation of these laws. Feminist organizations monitor “the judicial interpretation of these legal reforms” in numerous ways (Caltekin Reference Caltekin2022, 18). “We Will Put an End to Femicides Platform” (Kadın Cinayetlerini Durdurucağiz Platformu; hereafter, The Platform), an organization that seeks justice for the victims of gendered violence, for instance, observes and publicizes court cases. Activists organize demonstrations in places where women are murdered or attacked both to raise awareness and to stop possible cover-ups. Feminist lawyers, such as the ones who are a part of the Gelincik Project, provide legal assistance and follow femicide victims’ cases. They also bring attention to procedural concerns as well as to judges’ discretionary use of Article 29 of the Turkish Criminal Law to grant sentence reductions to violent offenders on the grounds that they committed the act “in a state of anger or severe distress caused by an unjust act” (16). In doing so, these activists contest judicial interpretations by creating a narrative of resistance to move the meaning of the existing law toward an alternative vision of justice—a vision that finds its most succinct expression in the slogan: “Not Male Justice, Real Justice” (“Erkek Adalet Değil, Gerçek Adalet”).

The Platform also documents how the state institutions willfully disregard various provisions of Law 6284. The activists expose cases where the law enforcement officials’ reluctance to take preventive and protective measures prescribed by Law 6284 resulted in femicides. They keep a public record of femicides on their website drawing attention to the government’s failure to provide reliable data in violation of Law 6284. Finally, they release yearly reports documenting the government’s lack of compliance with the provisions of Law 6284 to open and maintain safehouses for women in abusive relationships.

For the feminist movement, the AKP regime’s failure to fulfill its legal obligations and responsibilities to its citizens, exemplified by its willful disregard of Law 6284, has become one of the most telling signs of its increasing authoritarianization, one with deadly consequences for many women. By refusing to abide by the provisions of Law 6284, which was enacted by the parliament in response to the years-long activism of feminist groups, the regime not only shows its disdain for democratic will formation but also, by enforcing some laws while ignoring others, undermines the fundamental principles of the rule of law: namely consistency, predictability, and transparency. For feminist activists, both when state officials disregard Law 6284 and when they instrumentalize Law 2911 to crush public dissent, they create lawlessness (hukuksuzluk) in the service of a regime that seeks to strip law of its normative content, reducing it simply to the political command of sovereign (kanun). To challenge this usurpation of power, feminist activists emphasize their status as equal citizens and contest the official interpretations of the existing laws to reclaim law (hukuk) as a source of rights and egalitarian norms.

This emphasis on equal citizenship along with the feminist activists’ rejection of the label of “lawbreaker”—even when they defy official orders—and their insistence that it is, in fact, the authorities who are undermining the law bring into sharp relief what is at stake in the now-classic slogan of the movement: “We are not shutting up, we are not afraid, we do not obey” (Susmuyoruz, Korkmuyoruz, Itaat Etmiyoruz). Read in this context, rather than being a call for disobedience (itaasizlik) to an otherwise legitimate authority, the slogan expresses a feminist refusal to obey a regime that seeks to establish a hierarchical relation between the state and its citizens, modeled on patriarchal rule. Feminist activists reject this command and obedience model of politics, whereby citizens are transformed into silent subjects who have no option other than to obey or disobey the authorities’ orders, by laying bare its patriarchal roots. They demonstrate that the ongoing attacks on the constitutional principles of the rule of law and freedom of assembly are integral to the regime’s broader strategy of enforcing unquestioning obedience to its discretionary and arbitrary rule. Standing up against this attempt to resurrect patriarchal authority in the realm of politics, activists uphold their authority to interpret the laws as equal citizens; engaging in “feminist rebellion” (feminist isyan), as they call it in their slogans, they resist the “lawlessness” (hukuksuzluk) of the “male-state” (@8MartYuruyus, March 8, 2023) and act as co-authors of law to counter its subversion by an increasingly authoritarian and lawless (hukuksuz) regime. The protesters’ insistence on the legality of their actions even as they openly defy administrative protest bans is crucial to the making of this claim. Folding such protests into the disobedience framework not only silences the voices of the protesters and erases their narratives of resistance but also adopts the state’s perspective regarding the “illegality” of their actions, thereby putting the protesters’ safety at serious risk.