ABSTRACT
The end of May 2013 witnessed a major uprising in Turkey, where hundreds of thousands of people across the country marched the streets to protest what they believed were governmental infringements upon basic human rights and freedoms. What started out as a peaceful sit-in to protest the destruction of Gezi Park in Istanbul quickly turned into fully-fledged resistance against the Justice and Development Party (JDP) government and Prime Minister Erdogan. One of the most conspicuous markers of the uprising was excessive police violence directed against peaceful protesters. As the resistance pitted the police and the public against each other, some groups stood out as carrying the protests forward at critical instances: workers and union representatives who had just been disallowed to organize May 1 demonstrations, university students, Alevis, LGBT representatives, and, finally, football fans. What these groups have in common is that they were rehearsed in their physical and theoretical confrontation with the police. They had, so to say, tasted the tear gas and had experience imagining themselves in opposition to the police.
