Clashing Turkish nationalisms through gezi movement: Reflections on everyday nationalism

Gezi protests which began as a reaction against the AKP’s authoritarian intervention into urban space in May 2013, in a short time, turned into a country-wide social movement that brought the various components of the society that have different political/ ideological tendencies together around a demand for democratic and pluralistic governance. In this social picture, Turkish nationalist discourse with its hybrid and complex content, and its eclectic, flexible and nonhomogeneous structure inevitably attained its own place. Unlike the primordialist approaches to nationalism which considers nations as preexisting structures, modernist theoreticians embrace it as an invented and imagined product of social engineering. This understanding which focuses on political institutions and actors overlooks the role of everyday life and individuals, as the real carriers of nationalism and national identity, in the story of nationalism. However, everyday nationalism conception on which this study will be based focuses on how nationalist discourses and symbols are internalized and reproduced by ordinary people in everyday life experiences with a micro sociological perspective. Hence, this study, benefiting from the concepts of “everyday nationalism”, aims to investigate how people who participated in the Gezi protests in the summer of 2013 subjectively construct or reconstruct their nationhood in their own discourses and narratives about their Gezi experiences. Is the perception of nationalism of these Gezi supporters compatible with the official nationalist rhetoric? The study will be based on qualitative data obtained from deep interviews with approximately 10 respondents who participated in the Gezi protests in the summer of 2013. The research findings will be analyzed by using discourse and narrative analysis. Participants’ perception of nationalism and their discursive construction of national identity in their everyday life will be traced through their experiences of Gezi protests