THE GEZI PARK PROTESTS AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT IN TURKEY: FROM EMERGENCE TO COALESCENCE WITHOUT BUREAUCRATIZATION
THE GEZI PARK PROTESTS AS A SOCIAL MOVEMENT IN TURKEY: FROM EMERGENCE TO COALESCENCE WITHOUT BUREAUCRATIZATION

Summary/Abstract: What began as a protest against the destruction of Istanbul’s Gezi Park for a shopping mall and reconstruction of an Ottoman-era military barracks IN May 2013 in a short time turned into country-wide anti-government protests, particularly as a result of excessive use of teargas and water cannons by the police, coupled with the aggressive and offensive rhetoric of the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan towards the protestors. The article first analyzes Gezi protests as a social movement by focusing on its characteristics, particularly the confrontation of ordinary citizens with elites through the contentious means, the political opportunities and constraints that shaped the movement, and factors stimulating and supporting it, including dense social networks and vibrant, action-oriented symbols. It then attempts to answer the question of why the Gezi Park movement was unable, despite accomplishing the first two stages of social movement development, namely ‘emergence’ and ‘coalescence’, to complete the third stage of ‘bureaucratization’ by concentrating on the heterogeneous structure of the protestors and their ideological differences.

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