Gaining Freedoms

In a time when ethnographic methods have come under growing scrutiny in sociology, we read ethnographies with special care. Berna Turam increases the initial level of intrigue with a bold opening argument: “Urban space takes on the role of generating power and change and demanding liberties when democracies weaken in relation to the freedoms and rights of minorities, the discontents, oppositional political forces” (14). Furthermore, Turam makes this argument not by looking at the conflicts between Muslim and secular(ist) actors, which has been a quite fashionable approach in the analyses of Turkish politics, but by focusing on the cleavages among the secular locals as well. Yes, the book is certainly interesting, especially for the urban sociologists, political sociologists, and social movements scholars. It is a difficult task to conduct comparative research that seeks to identify the fault lines in contested urban sites. In this case, these sites are an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Istanbul (Teşvikiye), a university campus again in Istanbul (nicknamed Freedom University), and one of the hip/former working-class-migrant neighborhoods of Berlin (Kreuzberg). Two waves of protest motivate the research in these sites: the Republican marches (2007) and the Gezi protests (2013). While both of the protests had an anti-government orientation, the former was a secular nationalist protest that split the opposition, and the latter united that opposition on the issue of rights. Therefore, these protests occur in two different times across two different fault lines. Even though these protests do not take center stage, the discussions that emerged in their aftermath haunt the ethnographer, who explores the conflict in the contested spaces of urban everyday life. The underlying question remains: How do we explain the emergence of new alliances that we witnessed in the Gezi protests when all political indicators signaled growing polarization just a few years ago?

Contentious politics · Ethnography · Gentrification · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scrutiny · Social movement · Sociology · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Gender Studies · Law · Sociology and Norbert Elias · Turkey's Politics and Society