ABSTRACT
On 31 May 2013, thousands of Istanbulites took to the streets and occupied Istanbul’s Gezi Park. The protests were ignited by arbitrary police violence against an initial group of peaceful activists who were resisting the demolition of Gezi Park as part of an urban transformation project. This impromptu mobilization in defence of an urban space soon sparked a mass uprising across the country, channeling growing discontent about the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) into open protest. Many people from various age groups, socioeconomic backgrounds and political convictions were among the protestors. However, a considerable majority of the contenders were university students, most of whom stated that they had never joined a protest before (Ercan Bilgiç and Kafkaslı, 2013). Student mobilization1 came as a surprise to many spectators, since the post-1980 generation of university students (those born in the 1980s and the 1990s) are often identified with political disengagement and apathy vis-à-vis previous generations of student rebels, who were the protagonists of resistance movements (both on and off campus) against the state. This chapter seeks to analyze the sources of student mobilization during the Gezi Resistance in Turkey. Addressing the saliency of lifestyle concerns in triggering student mobilization, the analysis aims to draw attention to the changing character of student activism in Turkey compared to previous manifestations of student politics. The chapter argues that the students mobilized during the Gezi Resistance to
stand against the culturally conservative and paternalistic discourse of the ruling party, which they perceived as a threat to their secular lifestyles. Their perception of threat unfolded as they felt that the ruling AKP had conceived of them as the ‘un-deserving’ citizens of the nation, pathologizing their values and life choices. Student mobilization, however, differed from the student protests of previous decades in three major ways. First, whereas previous generations of student activists mobilized over issues that were considered strictly ‘political’, a feeling of disempowerment (Göle, 2013) over their personal lives took the current generation of students to the streets. Second, unlike previous generations of student activists, students did not pursue explicitly political objectives towards political
transformation (e.g. overthrowing the government or the regime) and radical policy change. Rather, they demanded that they be ‘heard and respected’ as equal citizens of the nation. Third, student identity had functioned as a source of prestige and power for student activists in the past, enabling their claim to be the vanguards of political change. Students of the Gezi Resistance, however, did not emphasize their student identity when making sense of their mobilization. The analysis draws upon data that were collected through participant observation
during the first two weeks of the Gezi Resistance, and through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions between June and December 2013, and between January and May 2015. In-depth interviews and focus group discussions were conducted with university students who were pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees at public and private universities in Istanbul and in the capital city of Ankara. Two criteria were adopted to recruit research participants: some form of involvement in the Gezi Resistance (e.g. occupying the park, street protests, social media activism), and political disengagement prior to the uprising. Political disengagement was defined narrowly as having no formal membership of a political party or political organization. A public survey revealed that 92 per cent of the student participants in the Gezi Resistance had stated that they had joined the protests as ‘ordinary citizens’ with no affiliation to any political organization (KONDA, 2013). The adoption of political disengagement as a recruitment criterion aimed to increase the representativeness of the sample population. In order to recruit research participants, faculty members affiliated with different universities in Istanbul were contacted and asked to spread the recruitment advert among their students. Initial interviews were conducted with students who had responded positively to this recruitment call. The remaining participants were reached through snowballing among the friends of initial interview participants who had expressed their willingness to take part in the research. A total of 35 university students were recruited as research participants. The participants’ ages ranged from 19-30 years. Most of the participants stated that they came from middle class families. Males were overrepresented in the sample (there were 22 male and 13 female participants), as were those studying social sciences and humanities subjects (21 of the 35). The Ministry of Interior declared that people took to the streets in 79 cities (out of 81) across Turkey during the month of June in 2013 (Milliyet, 23 June 2013). The research sample did not reflect the diversity of participants in terms of location, since research was conducted only in the cities of Istanbul and Ankara. Those attending university in Istanbul were also overrepresented. Only five participants were recruited in the capital city of Ankara. The chapter proceeds as follows: the first section outlines the history of student
politics in Turkey from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, with an emphasis on the sources of student mobilization vis-à-vis the state response to student movements. The next section discusses the rule of the Justice and Development Party after it came to power in 2002, focusing in particular on its increasingly repressive and authoritarian stance following its consolidation of legislative and executive power after the 2011 general elections. The final section introduces the narratives of
university students who were participants in the 2013 Gezi Resistance. It uses these to explore the sources of their mobilization as well as to discuss the character of student politics during the Gezi Resistance vis-à-vis the previous manifestations of student activism in post-1960 Turkey. The conclusion summarizes the major arguments and discusses the implications of the case of Turkey for student politics in (semi-)authoritarian contexts characterized by religious conservatism.
