Making a People: Turkey’s “Democracy Watches” and Gezi-Envy

AuthorNazlı Konya
Published date01 October 2021
Date01 October 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720981904
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720981904
Political Theory
2021, Vol. 49(5) 828 –855
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720981904
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Article
Making a People:
Turkey’s “Democracy
Watches” and Gezi-Envy
Nazlı Konya1
Abstract
This article investigates a surplus quality that a “politics out of doors” embodies.
It argues that forms of mass appearance and protest manifest an aesthetic
and affective making of a people—a people that enjoys its togetherness
through visualized, vocalized, and performative expressions of its presence.
Generating and generated by a collective desire, this figure of a people
exceeds “the people” understood as a legally authorizing and legitimating
entity. I contend that the excess of desire can make popular protest a source
of “envy” for political authorities even at the height of their electoral power.
In conversation with Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec’s accounts of “envy”
and René Girard’s formulation of “mimetic desire,” I analyze the Turkish
regime’s orchestration of the 2016 “Democracy Watches” as an attempt
to create, harness, and appropriate a counter-equivalent desire to the 2013
antigovernment Gezi protests. In so doing, I reconceptualize peoplehood as
the synergetic enjoyment of assembled collectivities.
Keywords
protest, people, populism, desire, envy, mimesis
Introduction
On the night of July 15, 2016, during a fairly uneventful summer, there was
an attempted coup in Turkey. By sunrise the next day, it was clear that the
military faction responsible for the coup had failed in its proclaimed goal of
taking control of the government. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced
1Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Corresponding Author:
Nazlı Konya, Cornell University, 214 White Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
Email: nk534@cornell.edu
981904PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720981904Political TheoryKonya
research-article2020
Konya 829
that the military takeover had been thwarted by the heroic resistance of the
thousands of civilians who had poured into the streets in instantaneous
response to his televised FaceTime call-to-action at midnight on July 15th.
After the coup failed, Erdoğan continued to call people into the streets, to, as
he repeatedly put it, “watch for democracy.” So began the month-long
“Democracy Watches,” a set of mass gatherings elaborately curated by local
organizations of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and carried
out in major cities across Turkey.
In late July 2016, I attended my first Democracy Watch at Ankara’s Kızılay
Square, renamed, post-coup, “July 15 Kızılay National Will Square.” There
I was met with dizzying crowds, music, food, and drinks. I missed the
sandwich service but had tea—compliments of the AKP-governed Ankara
municipality—that critics would soon wittily rename “democracy-tea.” It
was served near democracy-tents hosting democracy-concerts and democ-
racy-forums, all set up by the AKP. The atmosphere at these government-
sponsored gatherings was festive in ways that oddly recalled the
antigovernment Gezi protests of 2013, with similar forms of crowd-drawing,
space-making activities, including tents with banners, communal dining,
music performances, photographs, and slogans on large movie-size screens.
Though largely without the collective organization and from-below creativity
of Gezi, the Watches opened a space of public appearance akin to Gezi where
attendees took pleasure in belonging to a community. I call these resonances
odd because the Gezi protestors had been brutally repressed by the AKP and
dismissed by then–prime minister Erdoğan as “a few looters,” “çapulcu,”
whose actions he described as ill-intentioned and unworthy of attention.1
Despite their devaluation and disparagement in a governmental strategy of
containment, the Gezi protests were not, however, set aside and left to be
forgotten.2 Recalling Gezi himself, in his first public appearance after the
2016 attempted coup, Erdoğan referred to the Topçu Barracks, the recon-
struction project that sparked the Gezi protests in the long summer of 2013,
proclaiming: “We will also build the replica of the historical barracks in
Taksim, whether they want it or not.”3 One year after the coup attempt, which
had, by then, been rebranded as a constituent moment through an act of par-
liament declaring July 15 a national holiday—the Day of Democracy and
Unity—Erdoğan addressed the question of who the “youth of the July 15”
was by drawing a contrast to the “youth of Gezi”:
One of the biggest heroes of the July 15 was our youth. . . . Immediately taking
action, they stood up against tanks and retrieved the areas invaded by the coup
plotters. . . . Those coming there that night were not the youth of Gezi Park.
Those who came there that night were the ones who loved the country.4

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