Mehmet Fatih Çömlekçi (Kırklareli University, Turkey) and Serhat Güney (Galatasaray University, Turkey)

Forthcoming in our November 2023 issue (Antipode Volume 55, Number 6), and available online now, Mehmet Fatih Çömlekçi and Serhat Güney’s “In Search of Free Spaces to Breathe: Turkey’s United June Movement, Social Uprising, and Spatial Maintainability” sets out to answer the question of what the practice of revolutionary politics looks like once the moment of revolution has passed.

Their article provides one account by focusing on the United June Movement, an activist group that emerged from the ferment of Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Park protests. It is an important case showing that even after mass protests have subsided, it is possible to adopt a socio-spatial perspective that is an alternative to hegemony. Looking at this group shows us when grassroots organisations, unburdened by traditional political organisations, unite in a loose and horizontal political coalition, they gain the power to challenge and intimidate the hegemonic bloc. Subverting existing spatial settings and creating free and open spaces after the fade out of mass protests enables the long-term socio-political interconnectedness of loose activist networks. However, when this loose political coalition scatters due to internal power struggles and electoral political divisions, they become vulnerable to the hegemonic order’s restraints and siege.

You can watch Mehmet Fatih Çömlekçi discussing this research below, taking in the socio-spatial practices of the UJM and neighbourhood forums of the Gezi Park protests, solidarity networks and long-term political organising, the creation and maintenance of “free spaces”, the threat of self-enclosure and isolation, and the legacies and afterlives of revolutionary politics in the current conjuncture.