An Assessment of the Gezi Protests in Turkey in 2013: Political Agency as anArticulation Practice

Abstract

The Gezi protests in Turkey in 2013 were a mass reaction to a government urban regeneration project in Istanbul's Taksim Square and Gezi Park. The mobilization, which started with occupying the park and square, rapidly expanded into a mass movement beyond İstanbul. Through analyzing the subjectification that emerged in the protests, this paperargues that the Gezi resistance represents a discursive articulation among diverse agencies and identities as Laclau and Mouffe suggest intheir radical democracy theory.The article aims to describe the movement's discursive elements, and reveal how the divergent elements linked in anarticulated whole and established new political frontiers, in order to understand how a diverse set of agencies and identities were able to act as an articulated whole. Was it a movement defending rights to the city, defending a life style or struggling against the government's neoliberal policies? I argue that partial struggles and diverse antagonisms in articulatory practices constituted a subject including all these contexts.

The Map to the Heart: An Analysis of Political Affectivity in Turkey

“…During the Gezi protests in 2013 diverse segments of the public came to the streets against the AKP's authoritarian system of governance; calling for social justice against the increasing restrictions on individual rights and freedoms (Bee, 2017;Öniş, 2015). The Gezi movement brought together people from diverse backgrounds, who shared individual grievances and hopes, fears and frustrations, and appeared to overcome ideological boundaries that traditionally set them apart (Bee & Kaya, 2017;Chrona & Bee, 2017;Göle, 2013;Öniş, 2015;Özdemir, 2015).…”