Place and Protest: the 'Occupy Gezi Movement' in Ankara (original) (raw)
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The Gezi Park Movement : a Turkish experience of the twenty-first-century collective movements
Based on the results of a field study conducted during the summer following the wave of mobilizations in Gezi, this article analyzes the development and the social, cultural, and political meanings of this collective movement, which began in Turkey at the end of May 2013 and has been evolving during the summer. The first part of the article addresses the subject of these mobilizations that are opposed to the planning policy, implemented by the government in a process of neo-liberal economic development. The second part discusses the subjective engagement of the protesters and the meaning they give it, by considering alternatives not only to this policy but to the influence exerted on the individual and social life by the technostructures of the systemic forces. The third part analyzes, on the one hand, the methods of direct and online communication for organizing protests and, on the other, the creation of new living constructs, where protesters experiment with the alternatives to the dominations they contest. It is through protest, but also creative and performative actions, that the individuals try to become subjects of their own lives, against these dominations in which the Turkish dimension is part of a global systemic context.
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2014
This paper will concentrate on revealing the ways in which the Occupy Gezi movement transformed the young city dwellers of Istanbul from being passive citizens to active citizens. In doing so, the paper will also dwell into the impat of the social media on this process of civic transformation. Occupy Gezi movement bears various characteristics similar to the preceding global social movements ranging from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street and Indignados movement in terms of the strategies and tactics employed by the young generations to challenge the growing impact of neoliberal forms of governmentality posed in the form of hegemonic organizations, charismatic leadership and consumerism. It is also similar to the others in the sense that it provided us with a prefigurative form of politics as it symbolized the rejection of vanguardism of the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in all walks of life engineering the life-worlds of Turkish citizens with regard to his intention of raising 'religious and conservative youth', his call to the mothers to give at least three births, his direct intervention in the content of the Turkish soap operas, his direct order in banning alcohol on university campus, his intention of building mosques in Taksim Square and Camlica Hill, his condescending say over the lives of individuals, and his increasing authoritarian discourse, which is based Islamic references. In other words, the Occupy Gezi movement was partly a social upheaval against the subtle Islamization of Turkish society and politics. The relevance of Occupygezi Movement to citizenship Occupy Gezi is a new global social movement, which has similar characteristics to its predecessors such as Tahrir Square, Occoupy Wallstreet, and European Indignado movement. Alain Badiou (2012) argued that Tahrir Square and all the activities which took place there such as fighting, barricading, camping, debating, cooking, bartering, caring for the wounded,
Political Geography
In Istanbul's history, Taksim Square has always been an identity place for activists, similar to Tahrir Square in Cairo or Maidan in Kiev, but this paper points out that the Gezi protests created other identity places across Istanbul. This article focuses on the notion of 'spaces of hope' in relation to ‘cycles of protests’ and ‘repertoires of collective action’, in examining the post-Occupy activism in Istanbul following the Gezi protests and in the face of increasing authoritarianism. Based on two phases of ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul from 2013 to 2017, commencing during the Gezi Park protests and later expanding to its anniversaries and other political events in the central parks of Istanbul, the paper traces the spatial memories, political emotions and cultural legacy of waves of protests. It defines the previously occupied parks as ‘political parks’ (Bayat, 1997, 2012) where identities of protesters transform and intersect through offline networks formed at various parks in Istanbul. This paper makes the case for how people's identities and political emotions transform due to their engagement with the spaces of social movements not only at their peak but also following their demise in an attempt to test, reinforce and challenge the participatory and spatial strategies of the Gezi protests and from a wider perspective other Occupy movements.
Istanbul's Taksim Square and Gezi Park: the place of protest and the ideology of place
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AbstractMay 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...
Turkey’s Arendtian Moment: Gezi Park Protests
Urban spaces have always been sites of conflict. This article examines the Gezi Park occupation of June 2013 in Istanbul. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's political theory and constructing Arendt's public space as an actual, physical location that allows members of a community to come together and act in concert to bring about social, political and cultural change, this article demonstrates that the occupied public spaces, such as Gezi Park, hold the potential for the creation of inclusive and active citizenship practices, and the possibility of direct, participatory democratic politics.
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New Perspectives on Turkey, 2018
Umut Özkırımlı (ed.). The Making of a Protest Movement: #occupygezi. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, xx + 154 pages./// Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış (eds.). ‘Everywhere Taksim’: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015, 296 pages./// Güneş Koç and Harun Aksu (eds.). Another Brick in the Barricade: The Gezi Resistance and Its Aftermath. Bremen: Weiner Verlag für Sozialforschung, 2015, 328 pages./// Efe Can Gürcan and Efe Peker. Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey’s Gezi Park. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 202 pages.