Gramsci in Taksim: A Critical Appraisal of Dualist Approaches to the Gezi Uprising
Association of American Geographers’ (AAG) 2015 Annual Meeting, Illinois, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, 21 - 25 Nisan 2015, (Yayınlanmadı)
- Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Yayınlanmadı
- Basıldığı Şehir: Illinois
- Basıldığı Ülke: Amerika Birleşik Devletleri
- Açık Arşiv Koleksiyonu: AVESİS Açık Erişim Koleksiyonu
- Bilecik Şeyh Edebali Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır
Özet
This paper mainly focuses on the development of the Gramscian critique of the dualist approaches to the Gezi Uprising. Gezi can safely be accepted as the greatest civil uprising in recent Turkish history. In the meanwhile, the protests have been portrayed as middle class, petty-bourgeois, and a ‘white Turks’ uprising based on an assumed antagonism between secularist people and an Islamist government. This understanding of the unrest brings us to a position where the underlying political economic aspects of the issue are overlooked, for a ‘secularist versus Islamist’ dichotomy would prevent us from comprehending the heterogeneous composition of demonstrators. The main argument in this paper is that the dualist reading of Gezi is based on the centre-periphery relations approach which considers the state and civil society as autonomous entities. In order to overcome the shortcomings of dualist reading, the Gramscian notion of the integral state is going to be utilised to understand Gezi. Therefore, it is argued in this paper that rather than an exclusively secular and middle class activism, the Gezi movement should be understood as a counter-hegemonic uprising based on different class fractions and ideological groups against the AKP’s authoritarian neoliberal hegemony which, in the words of Gramsci, is fast losing the unstable equilibrium between coercion and consent.