Between anxiety and hope :|the ebb and flow of prefigurative politics after Gezi Protests

Abstract

This thesis traces one of the enduring legacies of the Gezi Protests, prefigurative politics. Defined as a set of political actions that seeks to realize now the social relations that are aspired to be experienced in the future, the concept has come to be one of the defining characteristics of the global mass mobilizations in the twenty first century. Although it is possible to point out various remarkable prefigurative political actions throughout the 2000s, it was only after Gezi Protests that prefigurative politics received broader reception and propagation in Turkey. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with various prefigurative politics in Istanbul, this research focuses on the affective micro-dynamics behind the prefigurative experiences within the park and their multiplication into different sites. I argue that prefigurative practices provide certain mechanisms for the production and reproduction of a set of shared feelings that arose in the park, emboldening activists to undertake and sustain their political actions. While these mechanisms have been influential in terms of the initial drive for the proliferation of prefigurative politics right after Gezi Protests, I imply that their effects may have also been important for their sustenance despite the limitations related to the increasing authoritarianism. In that regard, in the last chapter, I focus on a specific case, Kadıköy Cooperative, to discuss how this initial drive has developed into an enduring institutional legacy. After all, I argue that this legacy indicates an emergent subjectivity that developed around the fundamental tenets of prefiguration, self-reflection, and solidarity that seeks to settle itself through a horizontal constitutional order.