Typologies of Transformation: Emotional, Cognitive, and Relational Liberations in the Gezi Protests

This paper investigates the Gezi Park protests as a paradigmatic example of eventful temporality, illustrating how critical junctures disrupt entrenched political routines, catalyzing transformative trajectories for activists. Drawing on a processual-relational approach, the study explores how Gezi served as a temporally significant moment, reshaping activists’ understandings of collective action and reconfiguring their political engagement through mechanisms of emotional, cognitive, and relational liberation. While emotional and cognitive liberation are well-documented in the literature, this research introduces the concept of relational liberation to capture the ways in which critical events forge, deepen, and reconfigure social ties, enabling new forms of collective belonging and solidarity. By framing relational liberation as a dynamic and iterative process, the study highlights its crucial role in sustaining activism in the wake of eventful protests. A key contribution of this paper is the theorization of loops—recurring cycles of emotional, cognitive, and relational liberations that interact and reinforce one another over time. These loops illustrate how eventful moments generate enduring transformations in activists’ trajectories, linking the disruptive potential of the immediate protest with the longer-term evolution of collective action. For instance, some participants, newly politicized during the protests, experienced emotional liberation as a jolt that propelled them into active engagement. Others, already politically active, underwent cognitive expansions and formed unexpected alliances, while the most experienced activists shifted their focus from large-scale ideological struggles to community-based, localized activism. The findings are based on 23 life-history interviews conducted with activists who participated in the Gezi protests and sustained their engagement in the years that followed. These interviews provide rich, longitudinal insights into how eventful temporality operates within activist trajectories and reveal the enduring effects of critical events on political participation. By situating these findings within the framework of eventful temporality, the paper advances our understanding of how critical events both reflect and reshape imagined, subjective, and objective temporalities. The concept of loops and relational liberation offers a fresh perspective for analyzing the temporal dynamics of contentious politics, providing insights into how collective action persists, adapts, and evolves beyond the immediacy of protests. This study contributes to broader discussions on temporality in social movement studies, bridging theoretical and empirical gaps to enhance our understanding of political transformation in the context of eventful protests.