The Contradictions of Erdoganism: Political Triumph versus Socio-Cultural Failure (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Gezi uprising can be considered a crucial turning in Turkish politics. As a response to countrywide democratic protests, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government revived the security state, escalated authoritarian tendencies, and started to organize a nationalist, Islamist, and conservative backlash. This essay argues that the Gezi Park protests revealed both the fragility of the AKP's hegemony and the limits of the dominant political group habitus, which were promoted by the party to consolidate political polarization in favor of the party's hegemony. Moreover, it is argued that the Gezi uprising transformed the culture of political protests in the country and paved the way for the emergence of affirmative resistance, radical imagination, and a new politics of desire and dignity against authoritarian and neoliberal policies.
The Gezi resistance and its aftermath: a radical democratic opportunity?
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/issue/57.html One of the most important uprisings in Turkish memory broke out by the end of spring 2013. Although the citizens of the world were used to unrests and occupations of public spaces in the name of reclaiming certain political issues, such a popular grassroots unrest was an unexpected happening for both the citizens and the government of Turkey. This article looks at a year of unrest and its expressions in terms of grassroots mobilisation and interaction with formal political processes. Following an overview of the unrest that is name as the Gezi Resistance the article explores new political formations such as the park forums, participatory forms of electoral monitoring and the attempts to bring the spirit of horizontal activism into scene of the mainstream Turkish politics. The article considers the occupation of the Park in central Istanbul as an opportunity for a radical democratic emancipation. As a public space that is accessible by various individuals the park turned into a space of appearance. And what the activists named 'the Gezi spirit' refers to the process of encountering and acknowledging the others to negotiate political positions. Despite the risks of being hijacked by mainstream political discourses the Gezi resistance bears the potential towards a radical democratic trajectory.
De-Orientalizing the Arab Spring, Bonomo University Press (forthcoming)
This study aims at transcending the essentialist accounts and homogenous constructions of the Gezi Park protests. It attempts to locate the context of the mass popular mobilisation into its sociological foundations by alluding to the concept of “anomie” developed by Émile Durkheim. The main argument of the study is that the explosion of the Gezi Protests and people’s frustration and disillusionment are rooted in Turkey’s anomic growth and discontinuation of democratisation process under the AKP decade. Relying on Durkheimian concept of anomie to understand this sociological development, it is argued that economic growth and formal democratisation under the AKP decade in the 2000s have raised people’s social expectations beyond their social limits. However, satisfactorily fulfilment of people’s expectations and aspirations are bound to fail under capitalist system. It is therefore emphasised that while the AKP implemented formal democratic reforms to control the military power and achieved high economic growth in a decade—which was unusual for Turkey—a dual process was on the track. While the political reforms and economic growth raised the expectations of society, frustrations of unfulfilled expectations and aspirations accumulated given that the AKP halted democratisation process after 2011 and started to play the role of a regulatory and authoritarian moral order.
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2018
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.