Radicalisation of politics and production of new alternatives: rethinking the secular/Islamic divide after the Gezi Park protests in Turkey

Abstract:

This article explores the potentiality of Turkey’s month-long experience with the Gezi Park protests to produce new alternatives to the existing hegemonic order. It argues that studying the productive potentiality of this experience requires exploring the radical political character that the protests acquired through the involvement of contending secular and Islamic communities. Based on field research at the Tables of the World fast-breaking (iftar) protests organised by the Anti-Capitalist Muslims group and drawing from a poststructuralist approach to radical politics, the political productivity of the Gezi protests is located in their potentiality to blur the historically prevalent ‘secular/Islamic divide’ that has dominated Turkish political life for decades. It is argued that whilst this blurring came into existence in the process of constructing a rigid political boundary against the governing Justice and Development Party, it also created a possibility in Turkey’s urban context to the emergence of ‘politics of recognition’ as a radical form of political interaction between secular and Islamic communities. Thus, instead of creating new insurmountable boundaries, it created the possibility of challenging deeply rooted imaginaries in both the secularist and Islamic political milieus.