Emergency in Protest

Young People’s Politics in the Gezi Protests

Abstract

Protests often indicate social states of emergency. The Gezi protests, in which people from various social, political, and class backgrounds went to the streets to voice their dissent, reflected a state of emergency in Turkey. Young people, often referred to as members of the country’s post-1980 apolitical generation within public discourse, unexpectedly gathered on the streets and acted as the frontrunners of this mass movement. Their way of protesting through creative performances and humor effectively increased their visibility. Drawing upon the concept of emergency, and guided by a cultural performative approach, this article focuses on young people’s experiences of protest. It is a study of the reasons and meanings behind young people’s participation in the protests, as well as of values such as trust, solidarity, and collectivity upon which their action was grounded. My findings are based on qualitative field research, i. e., in-depth interviews conducted with young participants of the Gezi protests in İstanbul. The investigation is driven by the questions of how young people describe the notion of the political in relation to trust, solidarity, and collectivity, and how these diverse ways of describing the political through practices foreshadow a new understanding of the political.