What is it about?
This study aims to explain Gezi Protest in Turkey, which took place in June 2013, as an urban social movement with its potentials and challenges. The Gezi Insurgency has been a significant moment of opposing the central government’s mega projects when autonomous communities and associations resisted against the imposed meanings on the city. The study argues that the Gezi Insurgency remained at the threshold of unleashing a new dynamic in Turkish politics, still with significant political after-effects.
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Why is it important?
It is important because the analysis depends on and is verified by open-ended, in-depth interviews we have conducted to make sense of and trace the lingering dynamics of the Gezi Insurgency in everyday life and assess its legacy. The key informants in this fieldwork were the representatives of the associations and civil initiatives that took an active part in the Gezi Insurgency, representatives of the consumer cooperatives formed in the aftermath of the Gezi Insurgency, representatives of the Istanbul City Council and Republican Peoples Party. In our fieldwork, we tried to assess both the historical background of the Gezi Resistance and the living legacy of the Resistance ten years after its irruption.
Perspectives
Memories of June 2013 are still very vivid. Both of the authors remember those days both as academics making sense of the social irruption and as citizens demanding and exercising their right to city. It has been a intellectually situmulating work to make sense of what has been the impact of those weeks on Turkish politics. Through this work, the authors might have also reflected on their political subjectivity.
aylin topal
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This page is a summary of: The Gezi Resistance at the Edge of Populist Rupture, February 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004691070_004.
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