Content area
Full Text
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 Erdogan 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.
Key words: Gezi Protests, social movement, AKP government, stages of social movements
Introduction
Turkey's Taksim Square or Gezi Park protests started in late May 2013 in Istanbul as an environmentalist reaction to the proposed transformation of a park into a shopping center located in a replica of an Ottoman-era military barracks building. The excessive use of teargas and water cannons by the police, coupled with the aggressive and offensive rhetoric of the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan towards the protestors, turned the environmental protests into a mass anti-government mobilization spreading to Ankara and Izmir and many other cities. The movement had drawn people from all strata of the society who joined mass demonstrations, neighborhood walks or protests from their balconies expressing their frustration with the government and the prime minister and calling for the government's resignation. The shopping center was not actually what the protests were really about. There was a much deeper unease against the policies followed by the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi -AKP) government. In a short time, these protests turned into a country-wide reaction against the capitalist policies pursued by AKP government towards the commercialization of the public space and the interference of Prime Minister in the individual choices and...