Rupture and Continuity in Street Protests in Turkey, from the 1970s to 2000s

Ruptures and continuities of social movements have long been a topic of inquiry in social movements research. This paper aims at analyzing social movements in Turkey in a continuum from the 1970s to the 2000s, with regards to three features that are central to social movements and protest, namely actors, repertoires of actions and issues. 

The youth in Turkey in the 1970s was highly politicized and involved in a cycle protest that was mainly composed of violent protests. The cycle ended with a coup d’état held in September 1984. The streets were silenced as a result. Starting to warm up again in 1990s, the political use of streets and social movements in Turkey have become an agenda thanks to the recent mass protests started with the occupation of Gezi Park in Istanbul.

Are there are similarities between the protests of 1970s and 2000s in Turkey? If so, how? While the recent protests were framed as something really new in Turkish political history, this study tries to answer these questions based on specific method of protest event analysis. In doing so I used the archive of Turkish daily Milliyet, on a daily basis, to reveal the actors, repertoires of actions and issues that were active and used in protests in Turkey in the last decades.