ABSTRACT
In the early summer of 2013, a momentous public protest took place in Istanbul, offering an invaluable source of information and perspectives on Turkish society in the neoliberal era. The event, which today is called the Gezi Park Protests, started as a small occupation in order to defend Gezi Park in the Istanbul’s city center from destruction by the government. The protests quickly snowballed into the biggest social protest that Turkey has seen since the 1970s, unleashing a massive social energy and producing one of the biggest laboratories for social dynamics in recent times. The Gezi Park Protests included massive demonstrations against the government’s recent policies and on and off occupation of the park space for several weeks, as well as brutal police violence against the protesters, occupiers and supporters. What was striking in the Gezi protests was the inability to define the protests through the existing academic frames. Protests were carried out by thousands of people with diverse political ideologies and socio-economic backgrounds. Even to this day, a satisfactory analysis of the protests is hard to find.
