Citizenship and Protest
Authors: Ayhan Kaya
DOI: 10.87349/ahuri/170109
Page No: 221-243
Abstract
Political protest has a long and contested history in contemporary Turkish politics. While street demonstrations have been central to the repertoire of Kurdish movements especially since the early 2000s as a by-product of Turkey’s Europeanization process, electoral forms of participation have been the prevalent mode among broader segments of the Turkish society in the post-1980 period. However, the consolidation of the AKP hegemony in electoral politics and increasing authoritarianism and Islamisation accompanying the personification of political rule after 2011 have carried non-electoral forms of participation, what one could call as “active citizenship,” to the forefront of political struggles. The Gezi movement of 2013, the largest mass mobilization in the Turkish history, epitomizes this dynamic. This chapter demonstrates how the Gezi protests cultivated more democratic forms of citizenship in defiance of the national education curricula designed to raise particular forms of citizenry in the service of the Turkish state elite. Based on the current state of the art, it argues how the Gezi generation has broken the binary opposition between being political and apolitical through different acts of citizenship.
