Modalities of Legal Repression After Mass Protests: Turkey and Spain in Comparative Perspective

Do regime differences matter when states face peaceful yet highly disruptive transgressive protests? This paper compares how Spain, a consolidated liberal democracy, and Turkey, an autocratizing regime, responded to their respective unprecedented nationwide protests in the 2010s, the Indignados and Gezi Park movements, and how their protest control repertoires have evolved since these episodes. Moving beyond the peak of mobilization, the paper focuses on the long-term institutional legacies of these episodes. Despite divergent regime trajectories following the protests, both states adopted increasingly repressive approaches to protest control to prevent the recurrence of large-scale, nonviolent disruptions of public order. Aware of the backlash that police violence can generate, authorities in both contexts have increasingly relied on legal repression for deterring participation and containing disruption. Yet, over time, the repertoires of legal repression have diverged. In Spain, repression has taken the form of largely invisible and discretionary administrative fines. In contrast, Turkish authorities have relied more heavily on pre-emptive administrative bans. These differences reflect distinct regime contexts yet, at the same time, reveal a shared drift toward a legal gray zone, where the right to protest is rendered ambiguous through discretionary administrative actions enabled by increasingly securitized legal frameworks.