From Political Participation to Defending Collective Action: The Intertwining of Moral Intuitions and Identities

Collective action research has often pointed to particular core motivations for participating in collective action, notably social identities relevant to the cause, identification with the social movement, a sense of injustice related to the identity in question, and belief in the efficacy of the movement to change things for the better (van Zomeren, 2013). Additionally, moral intuitions (e.g., “moral convictions”, van Zomeren, Kutlaca, & Turner-Zwinkels, 2018; and “moral obligations”, e.g., Vilas & Sabucedo, 2012; Sabucedo, Dono, Alzate, & Seoane, 2018) have been discussed as key motivations for participating in collective action. However, moral intuitions are often discussed as a separate path from the social identity dynamics of collective actors (Milesi & Alberici, 2016). We suggest that social identity provides the ground on which collective actors invoke and assess all considerations including morality. We investigate this intertwining between morality and identity in the collective action of Academics for Peace in Turkey. In January 2016, 1128 academics from Turkey and abroad petitioned to call the state to end violent oppression against Kurds. The government as well as pro-governmental agents and public figures responded to this call by criminalizing and targeting petitioner academics. After four academics held a press meeting to condemn the criminalization of the petition, they were arrested and detained for 40 days. Petitioner academics continued to be investigated, taken under custody, dismissed from their jobs and academic titles and finally sued by the state with allegations of terrorist propaganda and humiliating the Turkish nation. Throughout this process, the collective action dynamics continuously shifted, from individual political participation to criminalized collective action, creating tight and loose ties with the group, discourses of moral obligations and (dis)identifications as well as diverse strategies of (collective) acting depending on the daily conjuncture. The current research focuses on the current snapshot of the defense of the peace petition by academics in Turkey, in that we focus on how moral intuitions are intertwined with social identities in ‘defending’ one’s collective action. We specifically examine the defense statements of peace academics who have been put on trial by the state, on one specific hearing session (n=8). We thematically analyze them, selecting passages with moral intuitions for participation and examining whether and how these statements are linked to social identities. We argue that, in our times of collective action characterized by multitude of voices, collective actors can invoke different moral intuitions and identities while also exemplifying a general consonance between identity and morality for voicing need for positive social change. Rather than as a separate path, the moral intuitions are presented as an intertwining aspect of the identity such that, as a member, academics could not avoid acting to sign the petition. Results and implications will be discussed.