‘Love is over, this is going to be Turkey!’: Cathartic Resonance between the June 2013 Protests in Turkey and Brazil

Studies on the diffusion of protests and social movements stress the necessity of geographical, historical, organizational or cultural proximity as facilitating factors for the spread of ideas, frames, identities and repertoires of collective action. Yet in the last two decades, the explosion of various protests across the globe and their mobilizing impact on each other challenged this established view. The interactions between the June 2013 protests in Turkey and Brazil were no exceptions: despite the absence of proximity factors, protests in Turkey were referred to as a source of inspiration by a considerable number of Brazilian protesters. Designed as a case study that investigates the least-likely case of these cross-national protest interactions, this study explores why and how protests inspire other protests in distant and diverse places. To address these questions, I employed Grounded Theory by analyzing twenty-four in-depth interviews with protesters who participated in the June 2013 protests in Brazil. Drawing on the three-stage sentence-by-sentence coding procedure and constant comparison method, I introduced the mechanism of ‘cathartic resonance’ as an explanatory framework for the cross-national spread of protests even in the absence of proximity factors. Cathartic resonance refers to the stimulation of collective agency due to moral shocks that are triggered by the tragedy of a sympathetically identified foreign protester group. In its findings, this study reveals a novel mechanism of cross-national spread of protests based on the cognitive and emotional processes, which have been largely neglected in the social movement studies. It also aims to further refine the linear and causal theorization of protest diffusion from a more agentic, processual and cultural perspective. Lastly, it applies a still relatively innovative method (i.e., Grounded Theory) to this research by demonstrating its potential in social movement research.