Category Archives: Essays

Antipode: Defending Future Commons, The Gezi Experience – Ozan Karaman

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What made Gezi Experience  particularly striking is that through the commoning of Taksim (that is, its ‘enclosure’ against the state), and collective production of space, people were already actively producing a different kind of urban life. The Gezi struggle therefore was not simply about the conservation of an existing commons, but the defense – through production – of a future urban commons. [...] → Read the full article…

Slate: Turkey’s Hidden Revolution – Christopher de Bellaigue

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How Prime Minister Erdoğan accidentally fostered a generation of Turkish liberals. On Aug. 5 a court in western Turkey handed down life sentences to a score of retired military officers, including the former chief of the general staff, as well as politicians and media figures, for plotting attacks that would have hurled the country into chaos in preparation for a [...] → Read the full article…

BBC News: Gezi Park – Turkey’s new opposition movement

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It is a sunny afternoon in August. Sitting under the dappled shade of the plane trees, I watch a group of council workers tend the flowers by the central fountain of the park. A stray dog idly lies on the grass to escape Istanbul’s heat, while men and women stroll by, some with kids. This is a far cry from [...] → Read the full article…

Al Jazeera: In this sublime struggle of ours – After Egypt, on Turkey and terror, Ayça Çubukçu

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What does Erdogan’s government in Turkey and Sisi’s in Egypt share in common? ‘Nothing’ cannot be correct…Erdogan and Sisi are each fighting their own war on terror, yielding a violence that is no less legal or popular for its circular logics of clarification, writes Ayça Çubukçu. What does Prime Minister Erdogan’s government in Turkey have in common with General Sisi’s in Egypt? [...] → Read the full article…

Bianet: The tightening screws on press freedom in Turkey – Alev Yaman

Erdoğan’s AKP administration has had more than a decade to fix this imbalance in Turkey’s anti-terror legislation. Despite repeated attempts at reform in recent years, the desperate situation in relation to these provisions persists. The Turkish media’s lack of coverage of the Gezi Park protests has thrown an unprecedented light on the country’s long-suffering Fourth Estate. Ask any Turkish journalist [...] → Read the full article…

Vocativ: A Turkish Press Gag – How Erdogan is Suffocating the Journalists

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On an early morning in October 2011, I received a text from a columnist of a Turkish daily telling me to not give up. I was traveling in Amsterdam, still jet-lagged from the day before, and I didn’t know what he meant. Then I noticed my Twitter feed was overflowing with similar messages. It was my seventh year as a columnist [...] → Read the full article…

Artleaks: Another World Is Possible – What about an Anonymous Istanbul Biennial? – Ahmet Öğüt

On May 25, 2013, just before the beginning of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, I co-signed a letter by more than 100 arts and cultural practitioners that invited the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) and 13th Istanbul Biennial curatorial team to change their authoritarian reflex and judgmental attitude to the protest staged on March 10th at a [...] → Read the full article…

Jadaliyya: Self-fulfilling prophecy: understanding the uprising in Turkey – Erdem Yoruk

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For most people around the world, the recent uprising against Turkey’s ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) is still a puzzle. Why did a protest over a park lead to country-wide unrest so quickly? The Turkish government has explained what happened by resorting to a conspiracy theory, referring to an international “interest-rate lobby” that planned to overthrow the government. Yet, [...] → Read the full article…

Open Democracy: Turkey’s Gezi Park episode is far from over – Burak Kadercan

Paradoxically, Gezi Park presented Erdoğan with a golden opportunity, one that could also have helped Turkish democracy part company from the tendency of powerful political parties to drift into populism-fuelled authoritarianism. For the global media what happened in Gezi Park throughout June is now old news. Not so much for the citizens of Turkey. Gezi still remains the single most [...] → Read the full article…

Bianet: Here it was going on, in İzmir and right now – Gamze Kutlukaya

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After the first week, the police intervention decreased considerably and Kordon was transformed into a liberated, ‘Police Free Zone.’ Therefore, it was easier to sit and talk. On the evening of May 31st, I and my parents were at a wedding. Gezi Park was not a significant issue on my agenda. How could it be, anyway? There was nothing extraordinary [...] → Read the full article…

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