Future Imaginings in Social Movements: A Political Ethnography of Grassroots Activism in Contemporary Turkey

• In Event: 3451 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Temporality, History, and Collective Memory

Abstract

This paper engages with the question of coordinating action during transitional and politically volatile times, in high-stakes situations. I take grassroots activism in Istanbul, Turkey between 2017 and 2018 as a case in point, where, under a state of emergency, a constitutional referendum and presidential/general elections took place to institute a dictatorial regime. More specifically, I look at a local assembly that was established to campaign for the “no” vote against regime change in the referendum, and how it disintegrated at a time when coordinated action was perceived as the only viable strategy by the participants. Although social movement theory offers some explanations like political opportunities (McAdam, 1999), threats (Goldstone & Tilly, 2001), or strategic dilemmas (Jasper, 2006), it has largely overlooked future imaginings as a necessary temporal dimension that determines movement orientation and trajectories. Based on a total of 19 months of participant-observation supported by 47 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, I find that the disintegration of the assembly is best explained by the activists' competing interpretations and anticipations about the future. Using ethnographic field notes, I show how differences in temporal frameworks eroded the basis on which activists usually coordinated their next steps, leading to an unresolvable mismatch in expectations and hence, in action. I conclude by arguing that temporality in general and future imaginings in particular have not been systematically mobilized as a necessary explanatory dimension of activism. As such, this study contributes both to the study of social movements and the emerging “sociology of the future” (Mische, 2009).

Author

• Birgan Gokmenoglu, London School of Economics