The Making of a Protest Movement in Turkey #occupygezi

No one could have predicted that a peaceful sit-in to counter government plans to raze Istanbul's Gezi park would escalate into a country-wide protest movement, arguably the most serious political crisis Turkey, a country often hailed as a 'model' in the region, has faced in the last ten years.
The protests left 8 dead, more than 8,000 wounded, and the country deeply polarized. Much ink has been spilled since June 2013 to explain the Gezi protests in the media, most of it based on hasty analogies and banal platitudes, referring to a 'Turkish spring'. Yet no academic analyses of the protests have been published so far and it is in this context that this collection of essays, the first academic book on the topic in English, is both timely and important.
This collection offers a preliminary analysis of the Gezi protests and addresses the following key questions: 'How can we account for the protests?' 'Who were the protesters?' 'Why did the Justice and Development Party government choose to suppress the protests instead of meeting the demands of the protesters?' and 'Were Gezi protests in any way connected to protest movements in other parts of the world?'

Umit Özkirimli is Professor at Lund University, Sweden. He is also an Honorary Professor at University of Copenhagen and Senior Fellow at Sabanci University, Turkey.

1. Introduction; Umut Özkirimli
2. A Moment of Elation: The Gezi Protests/Resistance and the Fading of the AKP Project; Soli Özel
3. Brand Turkey and the Gezi Protests: Authoritarianism In Flux, Law, and Neoliberalism; Asli Igsiz
4. Gülenism: The Middle Way or Official Ideology?; Cihan Tugal
5. Can the 'Spirit Of Gezi' Transform Progressive Politics in Turkey?; Onur Bakiner
6. White Turks, Black Turks, and Negroes: The Politics of Polarization; Michael Ferguson
7. Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body; Zeynep Gambetti
8. Cruising Politics: Sexuality, Solidarity and Modularity after Gezi; Emrah Yildiz
9. Urban Utopias and How They Fell Apart: The Political Ecology of Gezi Parki; Ömür Harmansah
10. In Lieu of Conclusion: Rallying for Gezi, or Metaphors of Aporia and Empowerment; Spyros A. Sofos