“Thou Shall not Protest!”: Multi-Institutional Politics, Strategic Nonconfrontation and Islamic Mobilizations in Turkey

Abstract

This paper examines the divergent reactions of the two most prominent Turkish-Islamic movements to a crisis in the Parliament that centered on an elected Deputy's right to wear the headscarf. After the crisis, the National Outlook movement protested, while the Gülen movement became more conciliatory. Drawing on the Multi-Institutional Politics model, we argue that conflicting views on the nature of domination explain the disparate forms of collective action taken by the two movements. We introduce the concept “strategic nonconfrontation” as a type of nonviolent strategy to help understand the Gülen's movement's actions. We expand the nonviolent civil resistance literature by arguing that strategic nonconfrontation as a form of nonviolent resistance only becomes visible when we move beyond an exclusive focus on state power to understand the ways in which multiple systems of authority and power are constituted in society and perceived by activists. We analyze the discourse in newspapers produced by the movements in order to examine how each movement understood and defined the target of action and how that influenced their subsequent strategies.

Citation

Gürbüz, M.E. and Bernstein, M. (2012), "“Thou Shall not Protest!”: Multi-Institutional Politics, Strategic Nonconfrontation and Islamic Mobilizations in Turkey", Erickson Nepstad, S. and Kurtz, L.R. (Ed.) Nonviolent Conflict and Civil Resistance (Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, Vol. 34), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 63-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-786X(2012)0000034007