Gezi Uprising in a Macro-Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the class structure of the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey in comparison with the 2011 wave of global social unrest.  Although the Occupy-type movements that took place primarily in North America and Europe were important segments of the movements which created the 2011 wave of social unrest, they were not the only ones. For instance, the cluster of movements known as the "Arab Spring", or worker struggles in new zones of global production in South, Southeast and East Asia were also parts of the 2011 wave of unrest. Many studies which discuss the class composition of the 2011 revolutions, however, often rely on single analytical models mostly constructed upon the experiences of North American and European protests. Arguing that single analytical models will fail to address the complexity of the contemporary wave of social unrest, in this paper we discuss the class composition and social base of the 2013 Gezi uprising in Turkey in comparison with different segments of the 2011 wave of global social protest. In the first half of our paper, based on a database of newspaper reports on social protests from 1990 to 2012, we provide a global survey of the class structures of movements which constituted the 2011 wave of social unrest. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the class structure of 2013 Gezi uprising in respect to discussion of diverse class compositions of social protests across the world. We conclude that although the primary source of conflict resided in the changing condition of declining middle classes - like the North American and European cases, Gezi uprising differed from these cases in the way (1) how these middle class grievances were formed and articulated, and (2) how a larger coalition of class interests were created.