In the Aftermath of Gezi

From Social Movement to Social Change?

Oscar Hemer, Hans-Åke Persson, Oscar Hemer, Hans-Åke Persson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319518534
• Print ISBN:
  9783319518527
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics

This edited volume addresses various aspects of social and political development in Turkey and the latter's role within a global context. Paradigmatically and theoretically, it is situated in the realm of communication and/for social change. The chapters thread together to present a fresh and innovative study that explores an array of issues related to the Gezi protests and their aftermath by scholars and activists from Scandinavia, Turkey and India. Through its thorough analysis of the government's repressive policy and the communication strategies of resistance, during the protests as well as in the dramatic on-going aftermath, the volume has wide international and interdisciplinary appeal, suitable for those with an interest in globalization, communication and media, politics, and social change.

© The Author(s) 2017

O. Hemer, H.-Å. Persson (eds.)In the Aftermath of GeziPalgrave Studies in Communication for Social Changehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51853-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. In the Aftermath of Gezi: Introduction

Oscar Hemer¹ and Hans-Åke Persson²

(1)

Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

(2)

Roskilde University, Roskilde, Denmark

Oscar Hemer (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Hans-Åke Persson

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Social movementsSocial mediaKemalismKurdish minorityEuropeanizationIslamismWhite turks and black turks

End Abstract

A Liminal Moment

Travelling to Istanbul on 7 June 2016, to start the editing process of this anthology, we learned, on arrival at Kemal Atatürk Airport, that a major bomb blast had happened the same morning in central Istanbul. When we opened our phones they were full of worried messages and even a serious advice, from one of our home universities, to refrain from travelling.

We didn’t know exactly what had happened—the details were disclosed later¹—but we could sense the tension in the surprisingly chilly air. Terror attacks were yet to become routine, but the tourism industry had already suffered severely after the January attack by a female Chechen suicide bomber, killing thirteen, all foreigners, mostly Germans, and wounding another fourteen in the historical Sultanahmet district, and the similar targeting of foreigners two months later in a side alley to the main Istiklal street in the modern city centre.² Now it was the beginning of summer, supposedly high season, but there were hardly any foreign tourists to be seen from Túnel to Taksim, and we discovered (to our own surprise) that we walked Istiklal Caddesi with certain alertness to suspicious loners, male or female, or sudden sounds or movements. And we read fatigue in the faces that looked past us, and despair in the eyes of the waiters at the almost empty restaurants.

For one of us, who had made his first visit to Istanbul, as a reporter, in late 1998, there was a peculiar feeling of déjà-vu, like having come a full circle back to that winter of the so-called Öcalan crisis, when Italy had refused to surrender the captured PKK leader to Turkish law, and infuriated demonstrators burned Italian ties and spaghetti in the streets. Galatasaray was playing Juventus in the Champions’ League, luckily to a draw, because there was murder in the air (now, 18 years later, the opening games of the Euro Cup, heavily sponsored by Turkish Airlines, were screened in deserted sports bars).

The other of us, who happened to be in Istanbul for the first time in June 2013, at a conference that coincided with the culmination of the popular protests in Gezi Park and Taksim Square, was caught in the wave of fleeing protesters and spectators along Istiklal Caddesi, after the violent cleansing of the square by the police force. The government’s forceful response seemingly put an end to what three weeks earlier, on 28 May, had started with a small group of environmental activists protesting against the demolition of a symbolic green space in the heart of Istanbul. The initially modest demonstration soon turned into a social justice movement, based on various claims ranging from environmentalist concerns, anti-neoliberal stances, anti-government and anti-islamist sentiments to a forceful reaction against the use of excessive force and the police’s brutality towards the protesters, promoting not only the right to defend Gezi as a public space but raising wider and deeper concerns with regard to civic rights and individual freedoms.

Gezi is the focal point of this anthology; Gezi, viewed as a liminal moment, to use the late British anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept (Turner 1974), whose symbolic meaning and political significance has shifted in the years that have passed since the events, and whose long-term historical implications remain to be revealed. When we organised the seminar at the Swedish Research Institute, our aim was to put Gezi in context of other similar forms of (spontaneous) social protest movements in the early 2010s, most notably the so-called Arab Spring, and the “occupy” movements of Europe (Spain, Greece) and the Americas (USA, Brazil, Chile). A common denominator for all these more and less extensive popular upheavals seemed to be the key role that social media played, in the social mobilization as well as in the support and maintenance of the movements. The impetus in current media and communication research on social media, civic engagement and social movements can clearly be traced back to the discussions at the IAMCR conference in Istanbul in July 2011,³ which happened to coincide with the culmination of the Arab Spring and where the emerging new forms of social mobilization were debated in almost every panel (Hemer and Tufte 2016). The momentum is multi-disciplinary. While it has arguably pushed media and communication studies in a direction of less media-centric and more globally oriented perspectives, it has sparked an increasing interest in media and communication practices in other areas within the humanities and social sciences; among political scientists (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Kavada 2011, 2014; Della Porta and Rucht 2013; Mattoni and Treré 2014, 2016), sociologists (Couldry 2012; Gerbaudo and Treré 2015; Mayer et al. 2016), and anthropologists (Postill 2014a, b; Mollerup and Gaber 2015), to name only a few.

At the time of the seminar, relatively little had as yet been published about Gezi outside Turkey; only one anthology (Özkırımlı 2014, with an oft-quoted foreword by Judith Butler), although others were under way (David and Toktamış 2015; Koç and Harun 2015). The “lady in red dress” being pepper-sprayed has indeed become one of the “riot icons”, at par with the Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes mask (Gerbaudo and Treré 2015: 865), but the Gezi protests play a surprisingly marginal role in the abundant recent literature on media practices and social movements.

The seminar in May 2015 gathered academics and activists, from Turkey, the Nordic countries, and India. The academic affiliations ranged from History and Political Science to Social Anthropology and Media and Communication Studies. It was a fruitful interdisciplinary exchange of perspectives and analyses, and we, as editors, with a shared non-specialist interest in Istanbul and Turkey, were urged by some of the participants to pull together a publication. We were however hesitant to produce “another anthology”, unless we were convinced that it really added substantially to the previous ones. And after we had taken the decision to move forward, the process from seminar to anthology turned out to be more complicated than we had expected, partly—or mostly—due to the dramatic political development in Turkey after the seminar, starting with the elections in June 2015, when the People’s Democratic Party, HDP, managed to cross the 10% barrier to parliament and block President Erdoğan’s first attempt at constitutional reform,⁴ followed by the termination of the peace negotiations between the government and the PKK guerrilla and the renewal of both the government’s military campaign and the terror attacks by different militant Kurdish groups, and culminating with the failed military coup attempt on 16 July 2016, and the subsequent purging of alleged Gülen supporters and sympathisers from public office.⁵ While complicating our task as editors, these dramatic occurrences have also worked to the favour of this anthology. All the seven contributors who participated in the seminar have revisited their analyses in the light of the current events, and the remaining five authors, who were invited specifically to contribute to the anthology, have finalised their chapters as the coup attempt and its aftermath have evolved.

The aftermath of Gezi may, in this on-going turn of perspective, seem to be fading. What was celebrated as a sign of democratic maturity in a modern, prospective EU member state, economically prosperous yet burdened by a legacy of political authoritarianism, now may rather appear as an almost futile, courageous attempt to articulate visions of a pluralist political sphere in an increasingly repressive, conservative society, which perfectly fits Russian researcher Vladmir Gel’man’s concept “electoral authoritarianism” (Gel’man 2015). Spyros Sofos (Chap. 4 in this volume) even suggests the analogy to German writer Hans Fallada’s novel Alone in the City, about resistance in Nazi Germany. Yet the “almost” is an important reservation that refutes the parallel.

As demonstrated by the chapters of this anthology, there are many points of reference from which an understanding of the liminal moment of Gezi can begin. Before presenting the prism of perspectives in the following chapters, we like to dwell a little on one reference point, which at the time of the seminar did not stand out as clearly as it did on our return one year later for the start of the editorial process.

The Öcalan Paradox

1998 marked the 75th anniversary of the Turkish Republic; Istiklal Caddesi was adorned with leafy portals with the stylized jubilee emblem and Kemal Atatürk’s portrait in numerous varieties. At Galatasaray, an outdoor photo exhibition celebrated the modern republic’s formative decade. The defiant confidence of the pictured citizens, not least the women, evoked dual associations: to the enlightened pioneers of liberal democracy as well as the forerunners of totalitarian ideologies. Turkey’s own modernist recipe, Kemalism, is—or was—a strange hybrid of fervent nationalism and extreme (secular) anti-traditionalism. As opposed to the contemporary European fascism, Atatürk’s authoritarian state was based on republican citizenship. “The shaping of a citizen” was the title of the jubilee exhibition and the wall of the facing bank office was covered by portraits of “ordinary” Turks, displaying the ethnic diversity of the young republic. The Macedonian Kemal, with his Northern European complexion (light hair, blue eyes), incarnated the inclusive national identity: “He is Turk who calls himself Turk”. The gaze of Atatürk was ever-present, from the hip discothèque near Taksim square to the food stall by the Egyptian bazaar, and not only for the Jubilee. As late as 2011, when one of us last visited Istanbul before Gezi, the Atatürk portrait was a compulsory prop at every establishment, public or not. Five years later, the displaying of Kemal’s profile or signature stands out as a statement of protest against his presuming successor as father of the nation, Recep Erdoğan—the same Erdoğan who, in 1998, as the mayor of Istanbul, was popular even among the bobos (bourgeois bohemians) of Beyoğlu.

The resistance to Kemalism had two main bases: the Islamic clergy and the Kurdish minority. The Kurds was the only minority big enough to oppose assimilation under the Turkish nationalist banner. In 1998 this two front conflict remained intact, and the Kurdish question had nearly escalated to war with Syria, in the preceding phas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. In the Aftermath of Gezi: Introduction
• 2. What Emerged in the Gezi Park Occupation in Istanbul?
• 3. The Politics of Protest
• 4. Violent Communication and the Tyranny of the Majority
• 5. Alone in the City: Gezi as a Moment of Transgression
• 6. At the Intersection of Competing Modernizations: Gezi as a Litmus Test for the Public Sphere
• 7. It is Too Dangerous to be an Individual in Turkey
• 8. Gezi in the Center and Periphery the Protests as Communicated by the Turkish Media
• 9. The Gezi Movement Under a Connective Action Framework: Enhancing New Forms of Citizenship via Social Media
• 10. Activist Citizenship and the Dramaturgy of Social Change
• 11. Epilogue: #Occupygezi Movement and Right to the City
• Back Matter