Rethinking the Common of the People through Social Movements: Turkish Cases

Social movements are gaining importance against the institutional and formal politics. Because of the deficiency of liberal democracies and representative systems, ordinary people try to create new spaces to speak and to intervene the decision-making process. The point of the paper is that social movements emerge as a constitutive space to create common of the people who living together. Turkish movements could not engage with the alter-globalization movement in the beginning of the 2000s but now they affected and inspired these kind of grass-root events especially in the post-2010 period, Turkish movement cases can be analyze these "second-wave of alter-globalization movements" that one of the main arguments of the paper.

With Hardt and Negri’s word, social movements build “the common” to alternate the system, so the actions are indeed to search for the alternative way that is not experienced before. It was the class-struggle and revolution to hold together the movement in beginning of the century but nowadays the different demands and grievances are the topic of the political and struggles turned a kind of constellation. 

These actions can be seen as searching of a new common of Turkish people outside of the established politics. In Bayat’s terms, it can be titled as “becoming political” and because of shifting of human relations from passive network to active network. An also these are “prefigurative” movements that imagine a new society and politics beyond liberal democratic system. While democracy or individual liberation or participation concepts had not be main agenda of the Turkish movements during 1968 period. “The common” were presenting the national or patriotic emotions. But now Turkish movements are creating new common under the effect of the post-2010 global movements. The paper will be focused on more democracy demands of the latest movements in Turkey.