Previous episodes of contention were organized in a variety of different ways, but none had taken the form of local assemblies. This chapter aims to answer the question of why the “no” campaign took the organizational form that it did at this specific moment in time.
Tracing the transformation of grassroots organizational forms back to the Gezi protests of 2013, I will identify the continuities and changes that grassroots organizations went through between 2013 and 2017, when the local “no” assemblies were first established. I will then discuss how activists re-read the Gezi protests in light of the current political environment and adapted the way they did politics. I will argue that regime change led activists to combine rapid political learning through accumulated experiences with their expectation of increasing repression, which resulted in the specific form and structure of this local “no” assembly. In addition to the assembly’s organizational structure, this chapter will also detail the kinds of activities and events that the assembly organized, the materials they created and distributed, and the assembly’s position with regards to other local assemblies that were established after it.
“Gezi was ages ago!”: Gezi and its Aftermath
“So, are we going to talk about Gezi? It was ages ago!” reacts a potential interviewee, in May 2017, on the phone, when I tell him that I work on grassroots politics in Istanbul and would like to interview him. It is telling that he immediately thinks of the Gezi protests in 2013 upon hearing the phrase “grassroots politics”, that is, Gezi comes to mind as the only grassroots mobilization on a mass scale in contemporary Turkey, other than the decades-long Kurdish liberation movement. It is also telling because it was only four years ago that the largest mass protests in living memory had happened, and yet it felt “ages ago”. He was not alone in feeling like this either; what he said was only one of the variations on the same theme of Gezi seeming to have happened a long time ago, which was a common reaction by interviewees when I first told them about my research topic.
The reasons for the perception of the Gezi protests having happened a long time ago were twofold: The first was the number of political events that took place between Gezi and the referendum; the second was the meaning of these events, or in other words, the change in the political context. A young organizer of the assemblies who had been a part of the Gezi protests, and who has been involved in grassroots activism since then, put it concisely:
I learned so much from these experiences […] we lived through everything in a very condensed way, you know? There was Gezi, then squats, then there were the presidential elections in 2014 and [the HDP’s candidate] Demirtas won nine percent, then the local elections, then general elections [in 2015] and the threshold was passed [by the HDP], then there was 1 November [2015], then the
referendum. We experienced victories and defeats all together. We experienced in four, five years what a normal person could only fit into 50, 60 years.
The eventfulness of the period between the Gezi protests in 2013 and the referendum in 2017 led to the feeling of having experienced “50, 60 years” of political change.
Again, this was a common perception in my field site. “We have undergone a lifetime of political experiences during this time”, another participant of the assemblies texted the common WhatsApp group of all the assemblies in Istanbul, a week before the referendum. As the interviewee quoted above makes clear, the condensation of political experience in a short period of time led to rapid political learning for those who were actively involved in the various campaigns or attempts at organization since Gezi. As I have already elaborated on the political significance of these events in the Introduction, I will concentrate here on the different forms that grassroots attempts at mobilization that preceded each electoral event took.
The Gezi protests of 2013 were a series of protests that started with the uprooting of trees in Gezi Park next to Taksim Square in Istanbul. The protest to stop the destruction of the park quickly ascended to a mass protest after videos and photographs of police violence became viral and then spread across the country. A considerable amount of academic, semi-academic, and journalistic articles was written about the Gezi Park protests since then. Activist milieus mostly focused on the politics of the commons, horizontal organization structures and leaderlessness, direct democracy, new social movements, and urban social movements and the right to the city (e.g. Express Dergi, 2013, Issue 139). After the occupied Gezi Park was evacuated, participants gathered in parks in their neighbourhood and established local forums. Forums met regularly (every evening in the beginning, then every week until they transformed into other structures), and they aimed at having inclusive
discussions. The park forums lasted for a few months until winter. Some of these forums dissolved altogether; some were replaced by local initiatives, associations, and squats; and some turned into neighbourhood solidarity groups in 2014.
Local initiatives established after the park forums were the remnants or the legacy of the Gezi protests and the park forums. They were organized to keep participation at a stable level and to have more permanent structures in place so that Gezi’s organizational structure of non-hierarchy and leaderlessness, its decision-making procedure based on consensus, and its political culture of inclusiveness, anti-sexism, anti-racism, and respect for one another could be kept alive.32 These initiatives focused almost exclusively on local issues such as running the squat, late-night noise in residential streets, and protesting against the construction of a new car park in the neighbourhood. Some of these initiatives are still up and running.33
With the 2015 general elections, grassroots political activity gravitated towards election campaigns. This form of organization and mobilization started with the first general election in 2015,34 followed by the snap elections 4 months later, and
32 I am drawing on my unpublished master’s thesis (2015) based on ethnographic research conducted in the summer of 2014 in one of the squats in Istanbul. The thesis looked at the ways in which the squatters combined contentious forms of protest that were directed against the government with autonomous forms of protest that rejected institutional politics as a point of reference.
33 Onur Eylul Kara has recently published his book, “Yapabilecegimizi Yapmak: Minor Siyaset ve Turkiye Ornegi” (2019) which analyses local initiatives in Turkey, established before and after the Gezi protests.
34 The 7 June 2015 general elections have taken their place in the collective memory of the opposition as its biggest victory in a long time. What makes this election so important is that it was highly regarded as a moment of success beyond an electoral victory. The success was due to the HDP’s passing the 10%
election threshold to put an end to the AKP’s 13-year long seizure of power as the governing party, and the HDP’s proving itself as a strong mass political party and the 3rd largest party in the parliament. This perception in the opposition did not change after the government recommenced the war in Kurdish cities, when bombs started to go off in both the east and the west of Turkey, and when the HDP was
“hollowed out” by way of being imprisoned charged with aiding terrorist organizations, engaging in terrorist propaganda, and/or insulting the president or the Turkish state, in the months leading up to the snap elections on November 1st of the same year. The most noticeable effect of this success on leftist and socialist activists was the reappraisal of doing mass politics: Doing “mass politics” – meaning, doing politics with the masses – was an important lesson for socialists in particular, whose political parties on the margins of society had little to no contact with non-socialist voters since the late 1960s.
The HDP, being a “mass party”, was partially successful at reaching out to the Kurdish, non-socialist voter and by becoming the third party in the parliament, it proved itself as a political force, a
continued with the constitutional referendum in 2017. Independent election campaigns organized by grassroots activists were independent initiatives in the sense that they were not connected in any institutional or organizational way to the political party for which they campaigned (in this case, it was the HDP). The nature of these initiatives surely differed from previous grassroots organizations; whereas election campaigns were overtly targeting national politics, previous grassroots initiatives targeted their neighbours, local issues, and focused more on involving as many residents as possible into their daily lives and activities. However, for the organizers of these initiatives, there is a continuity between all these different forms of organizing that resulted from not only an overlap in their organizers, but also from the rapid accumulation of experience. In the case of the election initiatives, the continuity and the process of political learning manifested themselves in the adaptation of organizational structure and the decision-making process.
This background of a series of grassroots organizations and mobilizations that correspond to different episodes of contention within only a few years is important to answer the question of why the “no” campaign took the organizational form of local assemblies. In the following sections, I will discuss how the Gezi protests were re-read as part of the self-critique of its participants, describe the adaptations in organizational structure and the problems encountered during and after the campaign, and give a detailed overview of some of the materials and activities that the assembly organized.
and social spectrum, their only chance at democratization in the period until the referendum. After the referendum, the assemblies’ main concerns were becoming permanent political actors, institutionalization, and having a say in the negotiations for a democracy front, but in matters concerning protests or campaigns, discussions centred on the key phrase “regime change”, a point I will