Ten years after the Gezi Park protests: looking back on their legacy and impact

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Gezi Park protests are a milestone for system-challenging collective action practices in Turkey. Now, ten years later, we look back on the protests and their legacy. While the protests started in May 2013 as a response to the Taksim Project, which aimed to remove Gezi Park, they brought together thousands of people, including many who were protesting for the first time, to voice their opposition to then Prime Minister Erdoğan and his policies. Participants were initially held together by their opposition to Erdoğan, but soon overarching identities emerged that increased the connections between groups and created a solidarity that continued, in many cases, for years. In this piece we discuss the events that led up to the Gezi Park protests, the impact on its participants, and the outcome and legacy that they left behind. While the sociopolitical landscape has changed a great deal in the last ten years, the impact of the Gezi Park protests on Turkish society and culture remains.KEYWORDS: Gezi ParkİstanbulprotestsolidarityrepressionGezi spirit Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. The first author was born in the United States and moved to Turkey as an adult. The second author was born and raised in Turkey but pursued her postgraduate education and career abroad.Additional informationNotes on contributorsYasemin Gülsüm AcarDr. Yasemin Gülsüm Acar is a lecturer in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of St Andrews. Yasemin’s research interests include political protest and its consequences; political solidarity; politicisation and social identity, and intergroup relations/conflict. She received her PhD from Claremont Graduate University in 2015, where she focused on social identity and identity politicisation through collective action. Together with Özden Melis Uluğ, Yasemin has published numerous book chapters and articles about the Gezi Park protests, as well as a book entitled Bir olmadan biz olmak: Farklı gruplardan aktivistlerin gözüyle Gezi Direnişi [Becoming us without being one: The Gezi Resistance from the perspective of different activists].Özden Melis UluğDr. Özden Melis Uluğ is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex. She worked at Clark University as a Visiting Assistant Professor between 2019-2020 and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst between 2016-2019. She received her PhD in Psychology from Jacobs University Bremen, Germany in 2016. Her areas of research interest include intergroup conflict, intergroup contact, collective action, and solidarity between groups.