{"id":50885,"date":"2021-02-23T16:49:44","date_gmt":"2021-02-23T16:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=165880"},"modified":"2021-02-23T16:49:44","modified_gmt":"2021-02-23T16:49:44","slug":"turkeys-youth-hope-for-re-democratization-amid-polarization-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/23\/turkeys-youth-hope-for-re-democratization-amid-polarization-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Turkey\u2019s youth: Hope for re-democratization amid polarization"},"content":{"rendered":"
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As student protests continue at \u0130stanbul\u2019s Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University<\/a>, one of the country\u2019s most prestigious universities, President Recep Erdo\u011fan has been trying to mobilize his base by deepening polarization in the country. Until now, the response of Bogazici students had limited the effectiveness of Erdo\u011fan\u2019s authoritarian populism. This younger generation, aged below 30, has emerged as the third actor in this polarized political field, giving a glimpse of hope for Turkey\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

The problems and socio-political demands of young people are often treated as a \u201cnon-urgent\u201d or \u201cscarcely important\u201d matter. However, many studies indicate that millions of young Turks are beginning to demand a radical overhaul of the systems we live by and are capable of acting as force to transform Turkish politics.<\/p>\n

Demand for civil liberties<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Since early January, students and academics have been protesting Erdo\u011fan\u2019s appointment of an outside rector, Melih Bulu, at Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University. The university has long held the tradition of selecting its rector, but in 2016 the authority to select university rectors was transferred to the president, as part of Erdo\u011fan\u2019s strategy to take complete control of state institutions.<\/p>\n

When the protests began, the government immediately targeted those students demanding an election as \u201cterrorists\u201d. Students were exposed to police violence and some have been jailed. While the government sought out any conflict in the protests in order to encourage their base, student responses were on the whole creative, demonstrating a prevailing diversity and peaceful coexistence on campus.<\/p>\n

Nascent informal youth platforms<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Instead of participating in organized politics as members of youth branches of long-standing political parties, Turkish youth seem to be coming together under the influence of new, technologically innovative, inclusive and informal platforms. These platforms do not operate alongside the conventional socio-political fault lines of Turkey, such as secularism-Islamism, Left-Right, or Turkish-Kurdish. Instead these new youth platforms ask for and actively create \u201cgray areas\u201d where they can explore, debate, and negotiate these conventional cleavages to rethink their configurations. These groups often stress the fact that they do not want to be dominated by political polarization and the vocabulary accompanying it. Without necessarily refuting their identities, they would like to recreate a political field for debate, negotiation, deliberation and consensus. Gray Area Platform [Gri B\u00f6lge<\/em> in Turkish] is one of them and focuses its online activities on the problems of the youth and their vision for the future.<\/p>\n

There are other organizations that strive to address everyday problems that young people disproportionately suffer from. Youth Unemployed People Platform or KYKl\u0131lar Platformu (KYK is the abbreviation of Credit and Dormitory Institution) are examples of such issue-based platforms paying attention to Turkey\u2019s many socio-economic woes.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As student protests continue at \u0130stanbul\u2019s Bo\u011fazi\u00e7i University, one of the country\u2019s most prestigious universities, President Recep Erdo\u011fan has been trying to mobilize his base by deepening polarization\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2504,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2504"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50886,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50885\/revisions\/50886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}