Co-opting Practices of Resistance: Right Wing Populism and Its Grotesque Mimicry of Joyful Dissent

• In Event: Exploring Democratic Mobilizations Against Right-Wing Populism: Tapping, Historical, Contemporary and Global Reservoirs of Opposition Mini-Conference: Co-Opting Right-Wing Populism as a Tactic for the Left?

Abstract

Two years after the Gezi Protests, which constituted the most significant challenge to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s then twelve-year long rule, he and the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Paritisi, AKP) received another blow in the parliamentary elections of June 2015. To the surprise of many, the People’s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokrasi Partisi, HDP) became the first political party with a predominantly Kurdish base to pass the ten percent electoral threshold, preventing the AKP from forming a single party government for the first time since it took power. Faced with the risk of losing power, Erdoğan responded swiftly; he first called for a snap “repeat election,” then put an end to the ongoing peace process, resuming the military confrontation between the Kurdish Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) and state security forces in the South-East of Turkey. Starting in August 2015, the government declared extended curfews, some of which lasted up to 63 days, in various Kurdish towns including Sur, Cizre, Idil, and Nusaybin. Since the security forces geographically sealed off these regions and cut off their telephone and internet access, no communication could be established with the residents of these provinces as the operations continued. Today, we have a clearer idea as to what transpired during this de-facto military siege, partially thanks to the “trophy” photographs taken and disseminated by various members of the special security forces who, perhaps unwittingly, documented the gross human rights violations that they perpetuated. Drawing on the works of Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Judith Butler, this paper offers a critical analysis of these photographs as material artifacts of torture through which, to use Scarry’s words, “the conversion of real pain into the fiction of power” took place. The dissemination of such insignia of power through social media, I argue, plays an important role in authoritarian populist governments’ efforts to both galvanize their base and further intimidate dissenting voices. In this regard, it is especially telling that most of the publicly shared photos show members of the special security forces posing in front of graffiti that mimicked the innovative and humorous political graffiti that outpoured during the Gezi Protests. The paper concludes by exploring the reasons behind, the effects of, the security forces’ government sanctioned attempt to co-opt and re-purpose this particular practice of resistance that first emerged in a popular uprising whose subversive potential continues to haunt Erdoğan to this day.

Author

• Cigdem Cidam, Union College