Environment as Politics: Framing the Cerattepe Protest in Twitter

ABSTRACT

Environmental protests across the globe are often studied with a particular focus on their environmental aspects, but these protests are also embedded in a local political setting shaped by governmental policies. Recent environmental protests in Turkey, which appear to be based on ecological grievances, have developed as a response to political decisions that gave priority to economic development and national interests over environmental concerns. This study examines the political character of the environmental protest in Cerattepe, and focuses on the framing practices of its players in order to see if their motivations transcended environmental concerns. The research combines framing with network analysis, and studies the propagation of frames through Twitter. It has been found that the political economic aspects became predominant in the protest network, while the frames fostered dense connections between activist groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• political economy
• framing
• network analysis
• Twitter
• Cerattepe protest

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Jeff Goodwin for his valuable opinions and guidance. The author would also like to thank the participants of the Politics and Protest Workshop at the Graduate Center, CUNY and in particular John Krinsky and Ralph Chipman for their helpful feedback on a prior version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Burak Doğu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1153-5911

Notes

1 Environmental Performance Index. Retrieved from http://epi.yale.edu/country/turkey

2 Mining activities in the region are currently suspended as the legal process continues.

3 NCapture is a browser extension of NVivo, and Netlytic is a cloud-based text and social networks analyzer.

4 ForceAtlas 2 is a force vector algorithm, which offers a smooth and accurate experience to users helping to visualize any network without the need for optimizations (Jacomy, Heymann, Venturini, & Bastian, 2011). Still, some adjustments were needed and these were completed using Adobe Illustrator.

5 Twitter handles of media personalities and individual activists were anonymized throughout the work in order to protect their privacy.

6 The relational network provided in this research derived from the interactions between players in Twitter, and it should not be taken to represent the entire protest.

7 Links available in the tweets were followed regarding the cases in which tweets did not include any references for the coding of the frames, and the texts on the relevant web pages were consulted. Players were excluded from the figure if their tweets did not correspond to any frame.

8 All tweets presented in this paper were translated by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK; Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu) under Grant 1059B191501595.