Activist knowledge and nonviolent action : stories about Gezi Park protests in Turkey
Karelina, Anastasia (2015)
2015
Master's Programme in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research
Johtamiskorkeakoulu - School of Management
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2015-06-16
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:uta-201507272150
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:uta-201507272150
Tiivistelmä
Collective action is an alternative method of political participation that people resort to when they have no other channels to make their voices heard and pursue social change. This thesis focuses on nonviolent protest confronted by severe repression. The object of research is relationships between policing and forms of collective action in the interpretations of protest participants. To be precise, we examine how protesters’ perceptions of their own selves and the police, in other words, activist knowledge, influence formulation of resistance as nonviolent. The empirical part of our study is based on the case of Gezi Park protests in Turkey in summer 2013.
The method of narrative inquiry guides both elaboration of our research framework and questions and analysis of empirical material. This choice was not only prompted by the methodological needs of studying interpretations, but also by observations on the data which revealed active engagement of protest participants in various forms of storytelling. The stories were collected from online sources and examined qualitatively.
Results of the analysis comprise participants' interpretations of policing and resistance. Everyone had a story to tell - the story of an encounter with police violence. This experience brought deep sense of injustice and helplessness or, on the contrary, empowerment reached through the mechanisms of moral outrage and practice of resistance. The narratives show that perceptions of the police’s action and protesters’ understanding of their own identity and role are tightly interconnected, which, in its turn, contributes to their conceptualization of resistance. As a conclusion, the police had a significant role in the construction of activist knowledge by Gezi Park protest participants and, as a consequence, the type of collective action. While this study does not claim to have discovered any causation, our findings underscore once more the importance of interpretation processes for development of protest and their value for research.
The method of narrative inquiry guides both elaboration of our research framework and questions and analysis of empirical material. This choice was not only prompted by the methodological needs of studying interpretations, but also by observations on the data which revealed active engagement of protest participants in various forms of storytelling. The stories were collected from online sources and examined qualitatively.
Results of the analysis comprise participants' interpretations of policing and resistance. Everyone had a story to tell - the story of an encounter with police violence. This experience brought deep sense of injustice and helplessness or, on the contrary, empowerment reached through the mechanisms of moral outrage and practice of resistance. The narratives show that perceptions of the police’s action and protesters’ understanding of their own identity and role are tightly interconnected, which, in its turn, contributes to their conceptualization of resistance. As a conclusion, the police had a significant role in the construction of activist knowledge by Gezi Park protest participants and, as a consequence, the type of collective action. While this study does not claim to have discovered any causation, our findings underscore once more the importance of interpretation processes for development of protest and their value for research.