The Gezi Park Protests and the Escalation and De-Escalation of Political Contention

Abstract

This study argues that escalation and de-escalation processes lie at the heart of protest campaigns. These processes are largely determined by the interactions between protesters and governments, as well as the timing and types of strategies and tactics employed. The study examines the dynamics between the Turkish government and the protesters during the 2013 Gezi Protest Campaign. This campaign escalated quickly by generating massive support from different segments of the Turkish society in its earlier days, and then de-escalated and eventually demobilized without securing major concessions. By using original data collected from a Turkish newspaper, Cumhuriyet, the study illustrates how the trajectory of the Gezi campaign changed in response to the interactive dynamics between the government and the dissidents.

In Search of Free Spaces to Breathe: Turkey's United June Movement, Social Uprising, and Spatial Maintainability

“…This increased the authoritarian pressure on UJM, and many of the activists became anxious about constantly “being under surveillance”. As Demirel‐Pegg (2020:151) stresses, governments have a wide range of strategies and tactics to demobilise activists, even long after the social movement. All in all, the free spaces where UJM activists carry out their social visions based on democracy, equality, and participation have started to become, even for potential supporters , places that induce the risk of being negatively branded.…”

Introducing the Turkey Protest, Repression, and Pro-Government Rally Dataset (TPRPGRD)

“…Among these, only Arslanalp and Erkmen's studies overlap with the period of this dataset, but they solely focus on repressive mechanisms within the scope of protest bans. The research exploring the Gezi protests in 2013, on the other hand, provides data only for this limited period (Atak and della Porta 2016;Demirel-Pegg 2020;Demirel-Pegg and Rasler 2021). Third, this research provides a high quantity of coded events, allowing a detailed analysis of contentious dynamics.…”