Published as _Article in On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture
(ISSN 2366-4142)
EMERGENCY IN PROTEST: YOUNG PEOPLE’S POLITICS IN THE GEZI
PROTESTS
PINAR GÜMÜŞ
pinar.guemues@gcsc.uni-giessen.de
Pınar Gümüş has received her BA degree in Political Science and International Rela-
tions at Boğazici University and her MA degree in Cultural Studies at Sabancı Univer-
sity. In her MA thesis, she has studied the relationship between everyday life experi-
ence and on-stage performance focusing on an amateur youth theatre group as an eth-
nographic case study. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the International Gradu-
ate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen
(Germany). Her doctoral project working title is “Youth in Protest: Cultural Practices,
Politics and Being Young in Turkey.” She is also a researcher at Istanbul Bilgi Univer-
sity Youth Studies Unit. Her research interests are mainly in the fields of youth studies,
social movements, civil society studies as well as gender and performance studies.
KEYWORDS
Gezi protests, social movement, political, youth in Turkey, emergency, youth culture
PUBLICATION DATE
Issue 1, May 30, 2016
HOW TO CITE
Pınar Gümüş. “Emergency in Protest: Young People’s Politics in the Gezi Protests.”
On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 1 (2016). .
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On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture
Issue 1 (2016): Emergence/Emergency
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Emergency in Protest: Young People’s Politics in the
Gezi Protests
_Abstract
Protests often indicate social states of emergency. Protesters no longer agree with the
existing situation and the way their lives are regulated; therefore, they demand imme-
diate change. The Gezi protests, in which people from various social, political, and
class backgrounds went to the streets to voice their dissent, certainly reflected a state
of emergency in Turkey. Young people, often referred to as members of the country’s
post-1980 apolitical generation within public discourse, unexpectedly gathered on the
streets and acted as the frontrunners of this mass movement. What is more, their way
of protesting through creative performances and humor effectively increased their
visibility. Drawing upon the concept of emergency, and guided by a cultural performa-
tive approach, this article focuses on young people’s experiences of protest. It is a
study of the reasons and meanings behind young people’s participation in the protests,
as well as of values such as trust, solidarity, and collectivity upon which their action
was grounded. My findings are based on qualitative field research, i. e., in-depth in-
terviews conducted with young participants of the Gezi protests in İstanbul. The in-
vestigation is driven by the questions of how young people describe the notion of the
political in relation to trust, solidarity, and collectivity, and how these diverse ways of
describing the political through practices foreshadow a new understanding of the po-
litical, which gained momentum from the state of emergency of the Gezi protests.
1_Youth in the Gezi Protests
The Gezi protests, which took place from May–June 2013 in Turkey, started peacefully
with the occupation of Gezi Park in Taksim by ecological activists aiming to prevent
the cutting down of the park’s trees for the construction of a shopping mall and an
artillery barrack.1 The protests then spilled over into many parts of the country in a
short span of time, with the concerns of the protesters broadening to include policies
and discourses on issues such as women’s rights, family, education, and city gentrifi-
cation. Quantitative data collected in Gezi Park shows that the average age of partici-
pants was 28, with 57.6 percent of all participants being between 17–30 years old.2
Youth participation reached significant levels in İstanbul and other cities.
The protests in general, and the predominant participation of young people in par-
ticular, have been perceived as unprecedented and extraordinary. This perception is
worth questioning, as it reflects a preconception that contemporary youth in Turkey are
uninterested and even politically incapable. Nonetheless, these protests were unprece-
dented in the history of mass movements in Turkey for several reasons. First of all, in
terms of its scale and number of participants, it is considered to be the largest protest
movement in the history of the country, with at least 2.5 million protestors on the
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streets, not only of İstanbul, but in many of the cities in the country.3 Moreover, the
protests have been described as one of the unique examples in the history of Turkey in
which people from various political viewpoints, even from ones which are diametri-
cally opposed came together and collaborated during these protests.4 The protests were
comprised of marches, a two-week occupation of Gezi Park, creative performances,
and the use of humor in street art and chants. These were new elements in the history
of Turkish social movements.5 Young participants’ concerns and modes of communi-
cation lent the protests the majority of their content and tone.
Most of the young participants in the Gezi protests were members of the post-1980
generation, whose uninterested attitude towards politics has been deemed a result of
having grown up within the de-politicized atmosphere following the military coup of
1980. Moreover, like their peers of the neoliberal age, they have been widely charac-
terized as individualistic, consumerist, and uninterested in social issues. The Gezi pro-
tests therefore invalidated established perceptions about young people’s relationships
to politics. Although the perception that the youth are apolitical had been criticized by
social scientists in the field of youth studies,6 the protests made it clear that young
people’s relationships with the political sphere need to be understood in a deeper, more
complex manner, beyond an apolitical/political binary opposition.7
Focusing on the experiences of young participants in the Gezi protests, this article
aims to discover the diverse ways in which young people relate to the political. The
concept of emergency is employed as an analytical lens to open up a way to include the
simultaneous and sudden character of the protests and to underline the mode of young
people’s dissent. Taking the protests as a cultural process through which young people
continued to reflect upon, redefine, and construct their relationships to the political, the
transformative aspects of their experiences will be scrutinized and discussed with re-
gard to the possibility of a new political youth culture.
2_Emergency as Protest, Emergency in Protest
Emergency mostly refers to physically urgent situations that appear unexpectedly. The
state of emergency is an extraordinary rupture in the routine of everyday life, which
usually brings about a crisis to be survived and managed through rapid actions.
Protests often indicate social states of emergency. Protestors no longer agree with
the existing situation and the ways their lives are regulated, and therefore show their
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dissent and demand an immediate change. Thus, protests express a social problem that
needs to be coped with in order to be able to return to everyday life. The protest cy-
cle — including marches, occupations of public areas, and semi-permanent
camps — also presents an extraordinary situation to be organized. Meeting the protes-
tors’ physical needs such as hunger, thirst, shelter, sleep, as well as acting collectively
and making crucial decisions, are all types of emergency actions that ensure the pro-
testors’ survival. Therefore, emergency reflects an urgent social need for change, which
lays the groundwork for a protest as well as for state-of-emergency modes of collective
action.
Victor Turner, in analyzing the ritualistic dimension of the cultural process, under-
lines the notion of ‘liminality’ in the phase of social change. Liminality is an inbe-
tweenness and ambiguity outside the limits of structural order and carries the potential
to be “the venue and occasion for radical scepticism — always relative, of course, to
the given culture’s repertoire of sceptical concepts and images — about cherished val-
ues and rules”.8 Turner calls the collectivity that emerges in the process of this liminal
experience communitas. In contrast to structure, in communitas, participants are not
there to play their status-determined roles, but as “‘human totals’, integral beings who
recognizantly share the same humanity.” Thus, this form of collectivity is free from the
existing structural rules and status levels. Turner also identifies countercultural com-
munes, and specifically hippies, as examples of communitas.9 Underlining the per-
formative dimension of collective identity, Bernhard Giesen reads communities
through symbols and rituals. Taking a closer look at political performances, he states
that political performances are usually rituals of collective identity; for example,
[…] fights between protestors and the police are, evidently, not rational delibera-
tions about the common good or strategic choices in a power game. […] They are
not rational decisions between independent citizens, but ritual constructions of
community or of authority.10
Inspired by a cultural performative approach to analyzing social reality, this paper uses
the concept of emergency as a point of departure for understanding young people’s
protest experiences. How protest as a liminal space emerging out of a demand for
change points to a potential for radical skepticism and critical transformation is one of
the main questions that this analysis attempts to answer. Furthermore, how young peo-
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ple define their notions of the political will be studied with reference to young partici-
pants’ experiences of the rituals of protesting and values of trust, solidarity, and collec-
tivity.
3_Studying Social Movements, the Political, and Youth
Social movements have long been studied in terms of the masses, participants’ goals,
and their power/ability to influence the political sphere. Participants’ motivations and
the manner of their involvement have mostly been ignored by the grand theories of
social movements, which either focus on resource mobilization or on historical sys-
temic conflicts, both of which are structural explanations of people’s collective actions.
Regarding the limits of these grand theories in understanding social movements, James
J. Jasper points to an interpretive and action-oriented theorizing. Defining culture as
cognition, emotion, and morality, he calls for an analysis focusing on the cultural, un-
derlining meaning and interaction. In doing so, he directs attention to the participants
of the social movements as individuals and to their actions.11 People’s points of view,
their motivations, and their experiences are central to this cultural approach of social
movement research. Manuel Castells, who studies recent online and urban-based pro-
test movements, emphasizes the individual in social movements. He states that, while
grouping people’s experiences into analytical categories of social structure is a useful
method, the actual practices that generate social movements and change social struc-
tures are enacted by individuals. Thus, we have to understand the motivation of each
individual in detail.12 This paper analyzes the individual reflections of young people
involved in the Gezi protests, focusing on the diversity and complexity of their protest
experiences.
In his research on the counter-globalization movements of the 2000s, Yavuz
Yıldırım finds that the concept of ‘the political’ became more important than the con-
cepts of ‘politics’ and ‘policy’ as social movements started to specify their demands in
order to construct a grassroots democracy. While ‘politics’ mostly connotes institu-
tional limits, ‘the political’ provides more space for the intervention of ordinary peo-
ple.13 In parallel to this discussion, this paper regards ‘the political’ as a conceptual tool
for placing emphasis on the politics of the people, the street, and everyday life, without
limiting it to institutional dimensions. Moreover, following Therese O’Toole, Michael
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Lister, Dave Marsh, Su Jones, and Alex McDonag’s methodological approach in con-
ducting field research with young people, ‘the political’ will be used as a broad term
without tight theoretical limitations, avoiding narrow and top-down definitions. Broad-
ening the conception of ‘the political’ in that way, O’Toole et al. focus on how individ-
uals conceive of politics and interpret politics as a “lived experience” that refers to what
they find to be political in their lives, rather than responding to adult-made14 definitions
of the political and politics.15 In terms of understanding the young people involved in
the Gezi protests, this approach provides the possibility to overcome the limits of main-
stream, adult-centered conceptions of political activity that are at the heart of the con-
structed apolitical/political duality.
Youth as a social category cannot merely be defined in terms of age or biological
development. Being young reflects a power relation based on age,16 similar to how
gender reflects a power relation based on sex. The need to understand being young also
relates to the need to understand the construction of this age-based power relation.
Moreover, the meaning of youth is always context-specific. Rather than merely defin-
ing youth as a time period between certain ages in people’s lives and attributing certain
universal characteristics to that period, most social scientists agree that youth is a so-
cially-constructed category. As a product of modernity, youth consists of different ex-
periences in various socio-economic conditions.17 Socioeconomic situation, gender
identity, and ethnic and cultural belonging all shape the experience of being young.
Thus, the definition of youth is socially and culturally bounded. For this reason, how
youth is experienced in different contexts is one of the main questions of this study. In
studying youth in the context of protest, I use the concept of emergency to discuss
young people’s various ways of experiencing protest, with the aim of discovering gen-
erational aspects of the need for social change.18
4_Methodology
This article is based on interviews conducted with young participants of the Gezi pro-
tests in İstanbul. Between September 2013 and July 2015, forty in-depth interviews
were conducted with protestors between the ages of 18–30.19 These interviews focused
on young peoples’ individual reasons for participation, their experiences of the Gezi
protests, and their reflections on the notions of youth and the political. In terms of age
and gender distribution, 30 of the interviewees were between ages 18–25, while ten
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were between 25–30. Twenty-three were female, 16 were male, and one identified as
transgender. Twenty-two were students and 18 either worked (in various sectors) or
were unemployed. A broad spectrum of interviewees was chosen to reflect the variety
of social and political backgrounds of participants. The data used in this paper include
interviews with activists from ecological, feminist, LGBT, and right-to-city move-
ments, as well as young people who do not have any political affiliation.
My fieldwork focuses on the voices and concerns of young people, and so the inter-
views were conducted in a way that would allow interviewees the space to share their
experiences. Using “active and methodological listening,” the aim was to understand
the data emerging throughout the interview in the context of the specific social back-
ground of the interviewee.20 The interviews were structured by open-ended simple
questions and minimal interventions, when necessary.
The fieldwork material was analyzed by identifying themes found in the full tran-
scriptions of all the interviews. Young participants’ experiences of the Gezi protests
and their reflections on the notion of the political, as two of the main discussions that
emerged from the extensive data, will be presented here as the initial results of the data
analysis, which remains a work in progress.
5_“Politics landed on earth for the first time”: Unhappiness and the Need for
Expression
Many young people reported that they had been informed about the protests via social
media. They emphasized the spontaneity of their participation, as they had not planned
to go to the protests in advance, but found themselves on the street spontaneously.
Spontaneity does not refer to causeless participation; on the contrary, it points to a feel-
ing of emergency in which young people, mostly without second thought, went to sup-
port the people in the park. Many young people stated that the witnessing of violence
as it spread through social media was the main reason for their participation:
What brought me there was the police violence, that is to say when they burned
the tents and dragged people [through the streets], violence was the main reason
for me. (Student, 24)
Events leading up to the protests and the political atmosphere of the country also influ-
enced young people’s dissent, paving the way for the protests. The police force’s atti-
tude towards the May 1st demonstrations in 2013, the decision to destroy the historic
Emek Cinema, the proposed ban on abortion, and the regulation of alcohol are just
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some of the important events that interviewees mentioned had made them feel that their
freedom was restricted.21 Material problems and inequalities, the lack of autonomy that
young people face in their lives, from education and the workplace to within their own
families, were also brought up as factors that played into feelings of insecurity, anxiety,
uneasiness, and unhappiness. With this aspect, these protests reflect the “emotional
outburst” of individuals who felt ignored or misrepresented.22
The need to protect Gezi Park was also linked to young people’s relationship with
the city. Taksim, where Gezi Park is located, is a central gathering point on the Euro-
pean side of the city, where many young people (especially those from the middle class)
spend their free time, attend cultural events, eat in restaurants, etc. Moreover, Taksim
is the heart of political events and organizations. Many oppositional groups, as well as
groups from new social movements, are located in Taksim. Given the significance of
this location, reconstruction plans in Taksim were perceived as an intervention in one
of the most important places for young people. All in all, young people felt under pres-
sure from several directions. One of the interviewees describes her feelings before the
protests as such:
I remember that I was so unhappy a few months ago, before the protests, the time
that the oppression increased, and the events of the May 1st demonstrations, Emek
Cinema… It was like a stick beating against my head, and it was like it exploded,
then it was very much like a relief. (Unemployed, 30)
This quotation characterizes the protests as an emergency, as the result of an unbearable
emotional situation and an outlet for self-expression. It can be argued that this emo-
tional outburst did not reflect an individual, but rather a generational mood, and that
the situation was not unpredictable. In her study of the post-1980 generation’s con-
cerns, which aims to move beyond their stigmatization as apolitical and apathetic, De-
met Lüküslü states that young people are not uninterested in politics. Rather, they are
highly critical of the political sphere and can not find any space to express themselves.
Therefore, they chose to be “necessary conformists.” That is to say, young people felt
unhappy and uneasy in their socio-political atmosphere, however, rather than explicitly
revolt against the system, they use humor and ridicule to deal with their unhappiness23.
Participating in the protests became a way of expressing dissent publicly, still using
humor and youthful language, but in an open and collective manner. Young people’s
dissent emerged as a reflection of their need to be heard and seen as they are. Some of
the interviewees’ accounts clearly depict the degree of young people’s desperation,
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which has increased continuously, and especially in the period approaching the pro-
tests. One interviewee stated:
It is really hard to be young in Turkey… We constantly think about going away,
it’s always on our mind. However, if we do not struggle, who will change this
country, how will this country change, how will we do this? If we obey them in
everything they demand, then no one can live. Therefore we do not go anywhere,
even if we have this idea of going away. It is really hard to live here. It is politically
hard at the same time, people do not have freedom. (Student and feminist activist,
21)
The fact that protests are spaces for self-expression is also strongly linked to the poten-
tial of the protest experience to generate alternative relations with politics: politics be-
comes an available reality instead of an abstract position. One of the interviewees
framed it in a very telling way:
When these events (protests) occur, individuals one by one said: “Let’s go, people
are able to talk there.” Politics has landed on earth for the first time; it was always
in the air previously. (Employed, 28)
The significance of the protest was not only that young people overcame the borders
of conventional politics, in which they do not feel the opportunity to express themselves
as adults, but also surpassed their parents’ limiting and oppressive attitude. One of the
interviewees said:
These parents have raised their children to be too individualistic and career ori-
ented, I know that many people feel oppressed by this... That is why I think my
generation is under severe pressure. What happened in Gezi was not only against
the state, but also against the family. Our generation had a really hard time ‘com-
ing of age’, but Gezi made us grow up. (Student and ecological activist, 22)
The emphasis on “coming of age” also points to the experience of being young in a
power relationship based on age-hierarchy. The Gezi protests have been an opportunity
for young people to create a space free of adult prejudices and expectations. This can
be interpreted as an act of reclaiming youthfulness, described as individuality, creativ-
ity, and lightness, and being free from anxiety over the prospect of a future that is con-
tinuously controlled by the family and state.24 One of the interviewees commented on
the experience of being young in the Gezi protests:
Indeed, being young is so hard, but it was easier in Gezi Park. But it was a two-
week-long dream, we woke up, and it is again so hard. There, many things were
easy, everything was in our hands, we could go directly and eat, we could have a
book from the library in the park and look through it, we could play volleyball in
the park, we could dance the halay or horon,25 we were sharing with the others,
contacts were so strong, but then when it finished, we returned to our usual lives,
to our lives in Turkey. (Student and LGBT activist, 21)
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As the respondent here describes, the protest space served as a retreat from young peo-
ple’s usual lives. Surpassing the ever-present limitations and pressures of the adult
world, whether of the family or of state institutions, young people constructed a liminal
space as a result of their sense of emergency. The liminal is where being young is eas-
ier. It is a space that is free from deprivation: a collective kitchen and a library were set
up in the park, and participants played football and danced whenever they wanted. It
was a space for finding others and discovering a sense of togetherness. The protest
experience gave young people some sort of generational consciousness. Most likely, it
was the first time they felt connected to their generational peers in a positive sense, as
opposed to in a shared sense of guilt at being the members of an uninterested and apa-
thetic generation. An interviewee states that:
At least our generation came together; we understood that our expectations or as-
pirations, our grief and worries about the future are the same. This has been really
important for us... (Employed, 28)
Young people realized that they not only share similar concerns and life experiences
with their peers, but also spend time sharing similar activities, especially within online
spaces. Online games, and spending time in cyber space in general, are usually consid-
ered “doing nothing”26 by adults; however, these were the main sources of the youthful
character of the protests. One of the interviewees said that:
People were so happy in the Gezi protests. Because they were promising hope and
people became aware that they were not the only one, there were many others
killing time on 9GAG27... I was also relieved to find out in the Gezi process that I
was not crazy! (Student and ecological activist, 22)
It can be argued that the protest offered a space for individuals to recognize one another,
to discover their commonalities in the public space and realize that they are not uncon-
nected, but linked via instantaneous communications and passive networks that carry
the potential for building solidarity.28
Young participants emphasized the attitude of police forces against the initial pro-
testors in the park as one of the triggers that prompted them to take to the streets. In
addition, they were feeling insecure, unhappy, and oppressed because of several socio-
economic and political reasons, and these feelings laid the ground for the emotional
upheaval that prepared the Gezi protests. Even if this outburst indicates an emergency,
how these feelings were constructed up until the protests reflects a history on its own,
as detailed in young people’s individual narratives. Therefore, it can be argued that the
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protests did not simply come out of the blue. Rather, their urgency and suddenness is
embedded in a history of feeling oppressed and an accompanying need for outlets of
expression amongst young people. The protests were a space where young people’s
immediate need to express themselves could be fulfilled, and their expression took the
forms of humor and creative performances. Moreover, young participants built up a
generational consciousness and feeling of collectivity through this shared process of
expression. How have these feelings of commonality and collectivity translated into
values? Could these values be a basis for a new understanding of the political?
6_From Rituals to Values, Practices, and Everyday Life: Redefining Politics
When describing their experience of the protests, most interviewees began with small
anecdotes which, for them, reflect the spirit of the Gezi movement. The “spirit of Gezi”
has been an umbrella phrase for the values such as collectivity, sharing, protecting each
other in case of danger, being kind to others, and respecting differences. These were
the aspects of the protests through which participants started to imagine themselves as
members of a community. One of the interviewees provides an example:
I had forgotten to close my backpack while I was running out of the park; I think
I had tried to find something, water or something. While rushing around in the
middle of this turmoil, I heard the sound of the zipper of my backpack. I had left
it open, and someone had closed it while we were running. I have so many little
memories like this. (Student, 24)
The interviewees told many anecdotes similar to this one, which included stories about
sharing water or food or saying “sorry” when they hit one another while running. These
are all small and basic practices and gestures. However, it seems that all these little
things were reflections of values that young people felt had been absent for a long time.
What they discovered in the protest experience was therefore a mode of relating to one
another. One of the interviewees shared her irritation about the importance attributed
to people’s place of origin and points to the discriminatory potential of classifying peo-
ple this way. However, in the park, an ideal setting in her eyes, no one cared about
people’s origins:
When I was little, if someone hit me while walking, I would usually say excuse
me, but the one who hit me would go straight ahead. In the park, there were thou-
sands of people but no one hit one another. I was surprised. Or no one asked,
“Where are you from?” If someone asks my origin, I say I am an adopted child;
my origin is none of your business! No one asked about my origin in this park,
people asked about my blood type or if I was hungry. (Unemployed, 30)
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Information about blood types was collected in case protesters required immediate
treatment of injuries. Offers of food indicate that participants were concerned for each
other’s health and well-being. These are all state-of-emergency actions. Participants
developed consciousness of how, in their daily lives, socially constructed divisions
limit interaction, cooperation, and solidarity. Political tendencies, ethnicity, and place
of origin function as important determinants of people’s relations. Another interviewee
underlines aspects of communication and solidarity. Participants listened to each other,
and political groups that were thought to never come together cooperated in the park:
It is possible to talk about real solidarity in Gezi Park. I do not mention only food,
free tobacco or the revolution market.29 Actually, we were, like, really listening, I
had the feeling that people listen to each other. There were many flags of different
parties. The leftist groups, the LGBTs, etc., were there, they had their tables close
to each other, they were in solidarity, sharing their stuff, I saw all this. (Student,
24)
The two weeks spent in Gezi Park were a space for young people to practice these
values in numerous ways, and it had a life-changing effect on many. Many interviewees
described this period as a utopia and a dream — as an exceptional time. The practice
of commune life in the park undoubtedly had a political-theoretical basis, relating
mainly to anti-capitalism and people’s desire to control their own conditions and shape
their environment. An ecological activist states:
All the things that we have discussed before — alternative economy, solidarity
economy, city gardens — all of a sudden, all of them came true in Gezi Park. The
small world we imagined has started to exist. (Student and ecological activist, 24)
Communal living was the practice of what was thought to be impossible. It therefore
had the effect of changing people’s thoughts and lives. It reflects the transformative
potential of the liminal, of being between real life and utopia. The commune experience
in Gezi Park enabled participants to realize what they imagined. An interviewee de-
scribes his experience as a very special one in his life:
There was the culture of sharing. Everything was functioning well, there was the
health group, the kitchen group, the cleaning group, and we all had our gloves on
and picked up the mess in the mornings. It was really a camp site, a huge camping
zone, and there was a wonderful communal life. When I think about it now, this
was a very special part of my life — as if I lived in a different place and then I
woke up and came back to life. It was like a dream, a one- or two-week dream for
Turkey or İstanbul. (Student and LGBT activist, 21)
Interviewees also reported problems and crisis situations within this dream-like com-
mune experience, such as the quarrels between political groups, noncompliance with
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collective decisions, or the scarcity of resources in the park. However, all these difficult
moments did not seem to degrade the experience as a realization of utopian values.
When the occupation was ended by police intervention, people in the park decided
to continue with meetings in other parks in various neighborhoods. This was the end of
the commune period, but the start of a new practice. Participants viewed this time as an
experimental school for politics, during which they felt free to express themselves with-
out limitations. Young people whose sole affiliations were as Gezi protestors30 have
been mostly critical about the way oppositional political parties participate in these
forums, since they tend to overpower the discussions and approach the forum partici-
pants as potential members of their parties. However, despite all these problems, young
people mostly view the park forum and neighborhood meetings as processes through
which they became politicized. These meetings in parks and neighborhoods became
the places where the transformative potential that emerged from the protest period was
transferred to normal life. This promised a long-term, subtle politicizing effect that was
embedded in everyday life and focused on changing social norms. The aim was not
rapid change in institutions or in the current state of affairs. One of the respondents
states that:
What politicized people was not Gezi or the 15 days in the park, because that was
like a dream. Afterwards it changed and became a park forum, then neighborhood
forums, and then occupation houses. It is gradually emerged like this and this pro-
cess itself was the real one that politicized people. (Employed and right-to-city
activist, 23)
By the final phase of my field research in July 2015, some of these park and neighbor-
hood forums were still active, while some had moved to online platforms. However,
forums around İstanbul were not as lively as they had been just after the Gezi protests.
After the dispersion of many of the forums, the Gezi process seemed to be finalized.
Young participants reacted differently when asked to evaluate the whole process. Dis-
appointment had emerged as a significant mode of reflection:
Many people took to the streets, we hoped that many things would change, and
since this did not happen, we are disappointed. However, since I still have some
hope, I will continue. (Student and ecological activist, 24)
The protest and the commune period were described mostly as life-changing, dream-
like experiences. However, encounters with the police and physical and psychological
stress had traumatic effects on participants. Many people are now afraid of participating
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in political protests, as they learned what the consequences can be. A respondent situ-
ates young people’s hesitation as follows:
People are scared, I know. They are seriously afraid of getting involved, being
blacklisted, if something bad happens to them, if a gas bomb explodes when they
are in a demonstration… Many fears and anxieties… This is why many people do
not take part. (Student and right-to-city activist, 30)
While evaluating the results of the Gezi protests, an interviewee claimed that the most
significant consequences were not the material victories of the protests, such as the
blocking of the shopping mall’s construction. Rather, the process itself had irreversible
effects.31 Young people started to come together, to communicate, and to act collec-
tively. One interviewee calls this the “new personality”:
The main benefit is that a new personality emerged in people. What happened
after Gezi? The main achievement is not the prevention of the construction of a
shopping mall there. The main achievement is that people started to touch one
another, learn about their perspectives, and change their approaches towards each
other… What is important for me is this change. (Student and LGBT activist, 25)
This emphasis on the change in how young people relate to one another and the trans-
formative impact of the protests are important for understanding how the notion of the
political has been reconstructed since the protests. Young people who were already
active in new social movements — feminism, ecological and LGBT activism — before
Gezi brought their understanding and practical know-how into political practice. This
clearly shows that the Gezi protests did not emerge out of nothing, but were grounded
upon preexisting experiences and political practices.32 Also, young people who did not
have any political affiliation before the Gezi protests came to them with various under-
standings of the political. The reconstruction of the political during the protests is not
just a result of the convergence of these different levels of relating to and practicing the
political, but also of the way in which these extremely diverse understandings and prac-
tices blended. As underlined above, how participants related to each other and to their
environment is one of the main aspects of this blending. An interviewee defines the
political as follows:
For me, it starts with relationships. It is about how we relate to others and how we
live… How do we share our place, what do we eat and drink, how do we live, how
do we form relationships based on trust? If we cannot trust each other, we cannot
change anything. (Employed and ecological activist, 30)
The emphasis on trust here reveals the importance of values in the reconstruction of the
political. The political is formed on the grounds of values on which one’s relationship
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to the world and to him/herself is constructed; moreover, the political is developed in
how these values guide one in everyday life, and how real and honest one is in inter-
nalizing these values. One of the respondents explains her understanding of the political
as being equal to the ethical, emphasizing her own positioning and practices as central
to the notion of the political:
I am trying to live life, and politics means being as ethical as possible in my rela-
tionship to life and to myself. To the extent I can do this free from systemic im-
positions, I think that I will be political. Resistance, etc., all these have that kind
of a meaning for me, and this type of being political brings along some specific
acts. (Student and LGBT activist, 27)
Another respondent explains how “everything became political” for her — ironic for
the generation that has been labeled apolitical. This account also points to the very
dynamic of how the definition of the political is changing for young people:
If you want to save the trees, as it was in Gezi protests, or if you want to save your
rivers, you are opposing the system, because these are the things imposed upon
you by the system and when you oppose, as a matter of course you became polit-
ical. The ’90s generation is always referred as apolitical, but we became political
out of necessity. For example, I didn’t think that what I was doing was food poli-
tics, I realized afterwards how valuable a seed is. Okay, it’s just a seed, normally
it’s like flowers or birds, and you may think why do all these need to be political,
however, our time is the one in which all these things became political. (Student
and ecological activist, 24)
The political is reconstructed mainly in the details of everyday life. Moreover, young
people described the political as doing, acting, and performing — that is to say, the
political means practice, not theory or discussion:
… They perceive politics as words, as making comments to each other. However,
it is not like this. The political is life itself, what you wear, your style, your position
in life, your way of communicating with a person… (Unemployed and LGBT ac-
tivist, 20)
As these participants describe, the notion of the political refers to values, as well as to
how people perform these values in everyday life. This description of the political re-
flects a critical stance towards conventional politics. Young people’s relationships with
conventional politics is weakening day by day. Participants in my field research, in
accordance with results from previous qualitative studies conducted in Turkey,33 usu-
ally explain their lack of interest in politics by their perceptions of traditional politics
as a dirty and dishonest sphere that has no effect on their lives. Instead, they opt for a
more human-based politics in which people’s opportunities to express themselves and
participate in decisions is central. One of the interviewees says:
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(Politics is) letting the people express themselves, giving them authority… If you
only let the people express themselves once every five years, this is not repre-
sentative democracy. I see the issue as a question of rights. People should be able
to make decisions about the place they live in, their education, the taxes they
pay… My understanding of the political is not about political ideologies, but about
living humanely. (Student and right-to-city activist, 23)
An emphasis on everyday life, values, and practices underlines and reveals these inter-
viewees’ concerns with conventional politics. By broadening the space of the political
to include all spheres of everyday life and evaluating their practices within the frame-
work of values, young people attempt to alter the institutional limitations of conven-
tional politics.
7_Conclusion
This article focused on young people involved in the Gezi protests. It studied their ex-
periences of protest and drew upon the concept of emergency. Young people’s reasons
for participation in the protests and the meanings they attributed to the protests high-
light their need to express themselves and to escape a social state of emergency, char-
acterized by unhappiness, oppression, and insecurity. These feelings laid the ground-
work for a new generational consciousness as well as for an emotional upheaval that
led young people to become the participants of the Gezi protests. These feelings were
also translated into values such as collectivity, respect, trust, and solidarity during the
course of the protests. This translation, and its transformative potential, is interpreted
as the main accomplishment of young people involved in the Gezi protests. Young
people have reconstructed the notion of the political, grounded in values as they are
practiced and performed in everyday life. This way of reflecting upon the notion of the
political offers a way of understanding the basis of a new political youth culture.
The findings of this work are limited by its case study. Most participants were stu-
dents and employed young people, and therefore the participant profile does not include
youth from the lowest socio-economic strata of the society. Moreover, the differences
of the experiences of young participants in terms of gender, ethnicity, religion or socio-
economic background have not been emphasized, due to the paper’s focus on the com-
monalities of young people’s relation with the political. Being aware of these limita-
tions, this paper developed an understanding of young people’s ways of relating to the
notion of the political in Turkey focusing on Gezi protests. It is important to note that
in-depth future research with young people from different social, cultural, and political
backgrounds in various contexts will contribute to a holistic understanding of youth in
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society, as well as their relation with the political. Emergency as a concept has been
used in this work as an alternative way to approach young people’s politics, but un-
doubtedly, the need for the discovery of new concepts and approaches going beyond
the limitations of traditional concepts and categories in studying young people’s rela-
tion with politics, continues.
_Endnotes
1 This article is based on my doctoral research, entitled “Youth in Protest: Cultural Practices, Politics
and Being Young in Turkey” which is a work in progress. I am profoundly indebted to my super-
visor Prof. Jörn Ahrens for all his support throughout my research. I would like to thank my second
supervisor Assoc. Prof. Demet Lüküslü for her invaluable comments on an early version of this
article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of On_Culture for their com-
ments, and I am grateful to the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) for
its financial support.
2 KONDA, Gezi Raporu [Gezi Report], accessed 1 January, 2016, .
3 According to news referring to the data provided by the Ministry of Internal Affairs: Tolga Şardan,
“2.5 milyon insan 79 ilde sokağa indi,” milliyet.com.tr, June 23, 2013, accessed 2 January, 2016,
.
4 This narrative of togetherness undoubtedly deserves a more detailed analysis. My field data indi-
cates that the collocation of different groups and protestors is also characterized by internal and
external conflicts and disputes, in addition to collaboration and types of helping each other.
5 “New” does not refer to the new discovery of these ways and modes of protest in Turkey, but rather
to the new, blended, and distinct ways in which they are being used.
6 Cf. Leyla Neyzi, “Object or Subject? The Paradox of ‘Youth’ in Turkey,” in International Journal
of Middle East Studies 33 (2001), 411–432; Cf. Demet Lüküslü, Türkiye’de Gençlik Miti [The Myth
of Youth in Turkey] (İstanbul: İletişim Publishing, 2009).
7 The conceptualization of apolitical vs. political is worthy of analysis in itself. This paper does not
enter into this discussion in depth, since its primary concern is young people’s protest experience.
However, young people’s reflections, as well as definitions of the apolitical as a way to understand
their relation with the political, are addressed. For a recent discussion within the discipline of psy-
chology on the discourse of apolitical youth and the ways it functions, see: Bahar Tanyaş, “Gençler
ve Politik Katılım: Gezi Parkı Eylemleri’nde ‘Apolitik’ Nesil” [“Young people and political partic-
ipation: The ‘apolitical’ generation in the Gezi Park Protests,”] in Eleştirel Psikoloji Bülteni [Crit-
ical Psychology Bulletin] 6 (2015), 25–50.
8 Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988), 102.
9 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1969), 94–130.
10 Bernhard Giesen, “A Durkheimian perspective on the performative turn,” in Social Performance:
Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and
Jason L. Mast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 325–363, here: 353.
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11 James J. Jasper, “Social Movement Theory Today: Toward a Theory of Action?” in Sociology Com-
pass 4/11 (2010), 965–976.
12 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 2012), 13.
13 Yavuz Yıldırım, “The Differences of Gezi Park Resistance in Turkish Social Movements,” in In-
ternational Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 4. No. 5 (1), March (2014), 177–185,
here: 178.
14 This critical usage of “adult-made,” which is often used in youth studies, underlines the limitedness
of conceptualizations made regardless of young people’s own definitions and viewpoints in under-
standing youth.
15 Therese O’Toole et al., “Tuning Out or Left Out? Participation and Non-Participation among Young
People,” in Contemporary Politics 9/1 (2003), 45–61, here: 52–53.
16 Pierre Bourdieu, “‘Youth’ is Just a Word,” in Sociology in Question, Pierre Bourdieu (Lon-
don/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993), 94–101, here: 94.
17 Johanna Wyn and Rob White, Rethinking Youth (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage Publi-
cations, 1997).
18 For a detailed discussion of the notion of urgency in relation to working class young people’s ways
of coping with social and economic exclusion, please see: Deniz Yonucu, “Capitalism, Desperation
and Urgency,” in Red Threat Online Journal 3 (2011), n. p., accessed May 18, 2016,
.
19 This research treats the Gezi protests as a process that includes on-street protests, the occupation of
the Park, and the forums that took place afterwards; therefore, young people’s participation refers
to participation in all of these phases. There were two interviewees who were not in the country
during the protests; however, because they were active in online platforms throughout that period
and actively participated in forums and meetings in the aftermath of the protests when they came
back to Turkey, they are referred to as participants.
20 Pierre Bourdieu, “Understanding,” in The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary
Society, Pierre Bourdieu et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 607–626, here: 609.
21 The important social and political events that led up to the Gezi protests deserve more detailed
analysis. In this paper, however, they are mentioned as they emerged in the interviews — as the
background of young people’s feelings.
22 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 2012), here: 15.
23 Cf. Demet Lüküslü, Türkiye’de Gençlik Miti [The Myth of Youth in Turkey] (İstanbul: İletişim
Publishing, 2009), here: 189–194.
24 Cf. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford
University Press. 2010) here: 18–19.
25 Halay is the traditional folk dance of the eastern part of Turkey; horon is the traditional folk dance
of the region near the Black Sea.
26 For a discussion on young people and “doing nothing”, please see J. Abbott-Chapman and M. Rob-
inson, “Leisure Activities, Place and Identity,” in Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood, ed.
Andy Furlong (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009).
27 9GAG is an online platform on which internet memes, humorous photos, and videos are shared and
uploaded.
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28 Cf. Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford: Stanford
University Press. 2010), 23.
29 Revolution market is the name of the tent inside the park where food and beverages were brought
and distributed for free to protestors.
30 “Gezici” as it is used in Turkish.
31 For a discussion on the long term transformative effects of the protests for feminist participants, see
Buket Türkmen, “Gezi Direnişi ve Kadın Özneler” [“Gezi resistance and women subjects”,] in
Kültür ve İletişim [Culture and Communication] 34 (2014), 11–35.
32 Cf. Pınar Gümüş and Volkan Yılmaz, “Chapter 10: Where did Gezi come from? Exploring the
Links between Youth Political Activism before and during the Gezi Protests,” in ‘Everywhere
Taksim’: Sowing the Seeds for a New Turkey at Gezi, eds. Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 185–199.
33 For a detailed discussion on young people’s perceptions of the traditional politics, please see Demet
Lüküslü, Türkiye’de Gençlik Miti [The Myth of Youth in Turkey] (İstanbul: İletişim Publishing,
2009), 145–166.
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