Date

2022-07-01

Author

Ertuğrul, Kürşad

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This article defines the Gezi insurgency as a case of ‘counter-conduct’ with a heterotopia in a Foucauldian sense and compares it with similar movements to underline its peculiarity. It argues that Gezi cannot be defined as an ‘anti-austerity’ or ‘anti-dictatorship’ movement. Rather, it was a struggle against the neoliberal-cum-neoconservative conduct under AKP rule and its leadership taking the form of a pseudo-presidential regime. Gezi not only was a search for a different conduct but also a possible self-conduct through self-invention in prefigurative experimentations with different ways of being and practicing direct democracy in the reclaimed public spaces that characterized the action process. What sustained this counteraction process was the spontaneous constitution or deployment of certain platforms like Blok and C¸ars¸ı which did not, in themselves, express or represent any given social or political organization nor a corresponding form of a generic identity. In the Gezi insurgency, actors tended to outflow their defining social categories and become a part of the series of performances in which a sense of self-transformation has been common.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/98534

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Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Article