The Protest Movement in Istanbul (original) (raw)
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BEING THERE: THE 2013 ANTI-GOVERNMENT PROTESTS IN ISTANBUL, TURKEY
By happenstance, we found ourselves in Istanbul, Turkey in early June 2013 only days after a mass anti-government protest developed in and around Gezi Park. In addition to informal discussions and interviews with academics and others, we visited the protest site and traveled throughout Istanbul to directly experience the atmosphere and events. We also conducted two studies of Turks' participation in, and views of, the protests. This paper recounts the events in Istanbul that summer and reviews our own, and other, social science research on the protests and the protestors. We focus on who the protestors were and why they protested, as opposed to the less engaged actions of visiting the protests or following them in the media.
Turkey was no democratic paradise before Erdogan’s JDP came to office. But the balance of power was such that no single actor (be it a party, civil association, or the military itself) was powerful enough to impose its will on the society, even if they wanted to. Now that the JDP is so powerful and without serious rivals, the country cannot afford anything other than becoming truly democratic so as to safeguard liberties against a tyranny of the majority, and that has not been happening. The result is greater polarization, which erupted in this week’s protests. Note: This is an abridged version of a longer essay posted here earlier.
History of Protest Spaces in İstanbul
2019
Main aim of this thesis is to examine evolution of protest spaces in İstanbul. While examining these spaces, I asked how social movements establish a relationship with the city and whether searching for particular spaces in which this relationship materialized can provide a new way of looking at the history of city and its transformation. For these purposes, a database of manifestations in İstanbul’s public spaces have been collected from newspapers and other periodical publications. News from 1960s which can be considered as the era of new wave in street manifestations chosen as start point for archival research whereas 2010 which marks a turning point because of May 1st celebrations in İstanbul marked its ending. This data provided a base for locating distinctive protest spaces in city’s borders. By using multi correspondence analysis, protests as well as their spaces, actors, dates and topics have been clustered. In order to understand the continuity and transformation, protest spaces and factors affecting their mobilization singularly examined according to location and in relation to turning points in Turkey’s political history. This helped to understand mobilizations of different groups and their relation to particular protest spaces.
Urban Social Movements in Turkey
2023
Many Turkish cities have witnessed increasing micro and macro-spatial dimensions in urban social movements, shaping urban space over recent decades. Typical Turkish urban social movements have generally shared the same goals, been based on actors’ lower-class backgrounds and locally-rooted associations, and have employed similar types of action and strategies against authority. However, the Gezi Park protests were of a singular and different character. This book aims to explore the Gezi Park protests, and discusses their role in changing the character of urban social movements in Turkey, by asking the following questions: What social, political, and economic forces changed the structure of the protests over the years in Turkey? In turn, how has the Gezi Park movement shaped our understanding of new Turkish urban social movements?
The Legacy of the Gezi Protests in Turkey
After Protest: Pathways Beyond Mass Mobilization, 2019
In May 2013, a group of activists staged a sitin at Istanbul’s Gezi Park, protesting the Turkish government’s plans to demolish the park to build a replica of the Ottoman-era Taksim Military Barracks that would include a shopping mall. The forced eviction of protesters from the park and the excessive use of police force sparked an unprecedented wave of mass demonstrations. Around 3 million people took to the streets across Turkey over a three-week period to protest a wide range of concerns. After these protests died down, activists had to adapt to a difficult political context. Many focused on local municipal issues and environmental concerns, while some civil society organizations focused on the more general state of Turkey’s democratic regression. Most activists, however, chose to adopt a lower profile as repression increased and the space for activism narrowed. In Turkey, postprotest attempts to form a new political party did not succeed.