Prolonged impact of the Gezi under democratic decline: An empirical study on shifts in collective action

This paper focuses on how transformative events shift forms of action, with a particular interest in repression. I explore the shifts in activists' political participation trajectories based on empirical data on consumption cooperatives in Turkey initiated in the post-Gezi period. The understudied prolonged impact of the Gezi protests of 2013 provides insight into the relational dynamics between activists' strategies, narratives, action repertoires, and repression. A decade old, the Gezi protests of Turkey have been marked as a “failure” both by the authorities in an attempt to reduce the credibility of the mobilization and by activists and scholars since it did not lead to any "big" policy level or institutional changes in the country. However, it does not mean the action was a "failure." In the post-Gezi period, spatial justice, including urban and environmental politics, has become one of the most influential mobilizations in the country. In addition, many small, locally focused environmental initiatives emerged. Some of these small initiatives did not come strictly from the Gezi protests, but many likely resulted from heightened democratic awareness and collective action practices after the demonstrations. Although, in the scholarship, the increasing numbers of similar examples that are conceptualized as “lifestyle activism" or "direct social action" are more likely to be associated with high levels of democracy; these locally organized cooperatives in Turkey that aim at the practices of everyday life rose under and against the democratic backsliding. With increasing repression and limited space for activism, and given the aggravated criminalization of environmental politics, specifically the Gezi, most activists chose to take a lower profile.