Turkey is ... | Headrush - Ed Webb's Dickinson Blog - 0 views
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What strikes me most about analyses I have looked at is the urge to compare. Taksim is or isn't Tahrir. Turkey is or isn't like Egypt/Tunisia/the USA. The protests in Gezi Park and elsewhere are more like #Occupy or more like the Arab uprisings of 2011.
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Prime Minister Erdogan has little in common with Mubarak, Ben Ali or, even less, Qadhafi. He is a legitimately elected (and re-elected) and popular leader. Turkey is a multiparty democracy in a way that the North African states never were before the uprisings.
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The ballot box is not, therefore, proving sufficiently responsive to that large segment of the population who feel underserved by the present government.
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Where comparative political analysis may be helpful, apart from providing some of the vocabulary to discuss these events, is in drawing attention to international forces that have played roles in the Turkish protests:
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In Tunisia and Egypt this enabled crony capitalist reforms, enriching a small elite and excluding the vast majority. Social justice and dignity became central demands of the protestors there.
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The protestors are not, by and large, economic victims of globalization. But the development of Gezi park was symptomatic of runaway gentrification and had the stench of corruption about it:
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Protestors globally are confronting local interactions of their national political and economic systems with the dominant economic ideology and forces of the post-Cold War world.
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Turkey is not Tunisia is not Egypt is not the USA. But neoliberal globalization has disrupted societies in all of those places, and some people have pushed back and are pushing back.
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An awesome look at Turkey from Ed Webb: "Students and others have been asking me for my thoughts on the protests in Turkey. There is much reporting and analysis already available, of varying quality, so I will be brief. I encourage those interested to keep an eye on my Twitter stream and my Diigo account where I have been collecting some of the more interesting interventions."