Written by Student Researchers Rebecca Varley and Max Fathy, EPIIC 2014
When choosing to come to Turkey to research the significance of the Gezi Park protests for Turkish Democracy, we did not anticipate that this uprising would be so directly connected to current events in Turkey. While we came to Turkey the extent to which the Gezi Park protests that took place earlier in 2013 reflect the strength or weakness of Turkish democracy, the corruption and graft scandal within the ruling AK Party has assumed control of the current national dialogue. This scandal has implicated ministers close to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and led to a fierce clash between the AK Party and the Judiciary. These events have presented us with a significant opportunity as researchers, however. Through our interviews, we have realized that the Gezi Protests and the corruption and graft scandal are inextricably interrelated events that both have important implications for the development of Turkish democracy. Far from receding into the past, the emotions of the Gezi Park protests have reentered the forefront of the Turkish national consciousness during our visit, allowing us to receive more thoughtful responses and draw deeper conclusions from our interviews. Our research on the Gezi Park protests has led us to spend the last week in Istanbul speaking with professors, business people, protestors, journalists, and policy analysts.
What's most interesting to us is how greatly the responses to identical questions vary throughout the different groups. Whether or not the protests demonstrated the strength or weakness of Turkish democracy is a rather controversial question, we've found. One person who spoke with us, a student who participated in the protests, emphatically believed that yes, the protests were the first of many public ruptures on the rocky road to a fuller democracy. However, another person, a policy analyst, believed that the protests were a failed endeavor. In his mind, they started with good intentions, but lost their unity after the first couple of days. He believes that we now find ourselves in a Turkey where the current Prime Minister is continuously consolidating power and chipping away at civil rights.
In all, the experience has opened our eyes to the complexity of Turkey's domestic and regional realities. The information we've gained on the ground has forced us to reexamine our starting assumptions. We've even rethought the most basic aspect of our research: our title page. Therefore, we believe our trip will yield insightful and new analysis into a topic area that is constantly changing. We hope to represent the opinions of all our interviewees as best we can, and are extremely grateful to have been given the opportunity to do so!
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