Resistance under confinement: resilience of protests and their limits in authoritarian Turkey

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the relationship between the process of autocratisation and protests, and argue that scholarship on electoral autocracies should not only focus on major protest cycles but also examine ‘ordinary’ protests to understand how social and political actors resist and push back against autocratisation. Using an original dataset of protest events from 2015 to 2021, we analyse the transformation of protests in Turkey as it experienced gradual but significant autocratisation. We discuss two mechanisms through which autocratisation might affect levels, actors and repertoires of protesting: first, via increasing repression; and, second, via the policy choices of the authoritarian regime. Our findings indicate that protests continued even under the state of emergency in Turkey, but with significant changes in levels and repertoires of protesting. The protest scene was dominated by protests using tactics that rely on a small number of individuals and are contained in their spatial reach and disruptiveness. This research underlines the importance of examining ordinary protests to analyse how autocratisation transforms protests, using original data from local sources.

Keywords:

• Autocratisation
• protests
• repression
• democratic resilience
• resistance
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Bilge Yabancı, Karabekir Akkoyunlu, Kerem Öktem, Luca Tomini and Johannes Gerschewski as well as the participants of the Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey (CEST) 2022 conference and the Resisting the Autocratic Turn conference at Université libre de Bruxelles in 2023 for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. The authors are also grateful to their research assistants Elif Ünal, Ulaş Erdoğdu, Hakan Kerim İlker and Ceren Filiz Eser for their meticulous work, without which this research would not have been possible. Lastly, they thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

The authors report that there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 We see competitive authoritarianism as a subtype of electoral authoritarianism and consider Turkey a competitive authoritarian regime with personalistic characteristics. See Levitsky and Way (2010) for a discussion of competitive authoritarianism, Esen and Gümüşçü (2016) for Turkey as a competitive authoritarian regime, and Diamond (2002) for competitive authoritarianism as a subtype of electoral authoritarianism.

2 Many Kurdish protests are protests about civil and political rights of Kurds, for instance, Kurds protesting the removal of their elected mayors from office. However, when a protest is specifically about claims by Kurds, we classify it as a Kurdish protest. Similar logic also applies, for instance, to protests against the violations of civil, political or social rights of women or LGBTQ groups, where we classify the protests under the category of the specific group.

3 This category consists almost exclusively of protests against the government’s violation of Boğaziçi University’s autonomy in 2021.

4 As pointed out earlier, our data captures unarmed protests taking place on streets and hunger strikes in prisons. We do not make any claims about the effects of repression over the level of armed mobilisation. We also point out that our data source, Bianet, is known to be an outlet that more regularly reports on the Kurdish movement in comparison to mainstream news outlets.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by Boğaziçi University Research Fund Grant Numbers 13661 and 19161.

Notes on contributors

Mert Arslanalp

Mert Arslanalp is Assistant Professor of political science at Boğaziçi University and Visiting Research Fellow (2023–24) at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid with a fellowship from The Scientific and Research Council of Turkey. Before joining Boğaziçi, he received his PhD in political science from Northwestern University. His research and teaching focus on the comparative study of social movements, protest repression, authoritarianism and urban politics, with a regional focus on Turkey, Latin America and Southern Europe. He has recently published in Territory, Politics, Governance; Democratization; South European Politics and Society; and Comparative Sociology, among other venues.

T. Deniz Erkmen

T. Deniz Erkmen received her PhD in political science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her BA degree in political science and international relations from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Currently, she is Assistant Professor in the International Relations Department at Özyeğin University, Istanbul. She has also worked as a Visiting Lecturer at Boise State University, ID, USA, and as a Research Fellow at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, in Berlin, Germany. Her teaching and research fields are comparative politics and political sociology, involving transnationalism, new middle classes, authoritarianism, autocratic legalism and protest repression. She has published in Territory, Politics, Governance; Sociology; Democratization; South European Politics and Society; Current Sociology; and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism.