Visualising peace across different languages: the Turkish language in protest 

Ekin Cotuk has been a member of the Visualising Peace team since Spring 2023. Her research is on language, linguistics, and peacebuilding.  

She has written a total of 5 blogs on the subject of peace linguistics, using a variety of case studies and providing bibliographies for each. The fifth of these appears below, and links to the others are included at the end of this post. 

June 2013 was an unprecedented time of protest in modern Turkish history. The protests and movements that overtook the country started in Istanbul, at Gezi Park. Gezi Park was one of the few remaining green areas in Istanbul, and then-Prime Minster Erdogan’s party had approved an urban development project which would convert the park into a replica of Ottoman military barracks, including a shopping mall.58 Late in the evening of the 27th of May, bulldozers entered the park to begin its demolition. Environmentalists begun a peaceful sit-in at Gezi Park to stop the trees from being cut down. On the 31st of May, police used excessive force to remove these protestors from the park, using tear-gas in proximity and burning their tents.59 As images of these injured protestors began to circulate on social media, many more joined the protest and what started as a small group of environmentalists trying to protect one of the few remaining green areas in Istanbul turned into a nationwide protest of the governing AKP (Justice and Development Party) and Erdogan’s political regime, becoming increasingly more authoritarian.60 

The language adopted by protesters are key moments of insight into not only the unique grievances expressed, but also how the protesters imagine and create a more peaceful future for themselves through the language that they use. The Gezi Park protests in Turkey offer particularly interesting insight on the unique language that emerges during protests, owing to the hybridisation of the Turkish language with English, but also the use of humour in the threat of brutal violence. Accessing and analysing the slogans, chants and the language used by protesters allow us to better understand how this community envisioned a better Turkey for themselves, but also how they sought to challenge the negative terms used to characterise them by the government. 

One of the ways the slogans of the Gezi protest visualised peace was emancipatory: the protestors sought to liberate themselves from the negative and repressive language used by Erdogan to foster peace among themselves. The most famous term that the protestors identified with was ‘çapulcu’, a Turkish word used to describe someone who disrupts order, roughly translated as ‘looter’ or ‘marauder.’61 Erdogan used this term to designate anyone participating in the protests during a speech responding to the protests, and the Gezi protestors created an identity around it.62 The word then came to mean ‘anyone who was fighting for [their] democratic rights’, but more broadly, inculcated the playful, creative and fun spirit of the Gezi protests.63 An outpouring of artistic expression emerged around this word in the form of graffiti, music (changing the lyrics of the songs to include the word), as well as whole YouTube videos explaining how to use the word, and what it means.64 Çapulcu, used pejoratively by Erdogan, was quickly democratised by the protestors and helped them unite under the çapulcu identity, which was a critical development for the movement seeing as the potential for the protestors to argue amongst themselves was high given the diversity of people participating.65 The Gezi protestors were also keen to represent themselves as a peaceful movement and group, which directly contradicts what Erdogan’s representation. ‘Politeness’, one of the pillars of the peaceful climate, led to the proliferation of peaceful language, with many taking care to avoid exclusionary and discriminatory phrases.66 Outside of the term ‘çapulcu’, other methods of repressing or dismissing the protests also quickly took over the language of the protests. Tear-gas canisters used by the police to disperse the protestors became symbols of the protest, as well as penguins, after CNN Turk famously broadcasted a documentary about penguins instead of covering the excessive use of force by the police against the protestors.67 Adopting these symbols in graffiti, the language of the Gezi park protest featured the mixing of linguistic and visual symbols of repression, strengthening the culture of the protests as a result.  

Linguistic and cultural hybridity was also used to counteract repression of the protests in media, and build a path towards peace with the involvement of the international community.68 Inadequate media coverage of the protests by national, Turkish-language broadcasters, testified to the protestor’s goals of reaching an international audience through gaining the attention of foreign media and using social media to proliferate their slogans. Variations of the word ‘çapulcu’ include ‘chappuller’, ‘chappullation’, to ‘chappull’, which are clearly noun and verb formations borrowed from English.69 The ‘ch’ replacing the ‘ç’ of the original word also contributes to a greater accessibility to its pronunciation for non-Turkish speakers. Mixing Turkish phrases with English not only helps the protests reach a global audience with using a global language, but also further democratise the movement by opening it up to different cultures, implying that anyone fighting for civil rights can identify as a çapulcu. The Turkish-English linguistic and cultural hybridity of the Gezi Park slogans, the most famous being ‘Everyday I’m capulling!’ (changed from American singer Rick Ross’ ‘Everyday I’m Hustlin’), exemplify this objective.70 Other slogans and social media hashtags include ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Chapulité’ and ‘The Incredible Halk’ (a play on words where ‘Hulk’ is substituted for the Turkish word for ‘people’, ‘halk’), which borrow cultural references from France and the Hollywood film industry.71 This multi-lingualism extended to include Kurdish and Armenian graffiti, whose presences are particularly important given the marginalisation and discrimination faced by Kurdish and Armenian people in Turkey.72   

Peace was also created during the protests with humour and satirical language, boosting morale. Humour is a powerful tool in strengthening any protest spirit: it provides an accessible method of education, create a vivid and memorable environment, foster an environment of diverse and creative expression, and reframe the protest as a fun activity for protestors, who are prone to suffering from mental exhaustion.73 This is particularly important taking into account the physical and mental exhaustion that many protestors would have suffered in Gezi, occupying the park and sleeping in tents, faced with the constant threat of being tear-gassed, beaten, or sprayed with highly-pressurised water from riot control vehicles, and also the possible repression facing them in the aftermath of the protests by the Turkish government. Consequently, humour becomes important in the creation of a Humorous graffiti in Gezi often directly targeted then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose full name was often used to create plays on words referring to various events during Gezi, and his prescriptive phrases (ranging from advising women on how many children to have to what the national drink of Turkey is) addressed at the Turkish public were often subverted and turned against him.74  

Peace in the Gezi movement was fostered and visualised in ways that are directly related to the Turkish context, and the Turkish language: subverting Erdogan’s rhetoric by uniting under a negative term that sought to divide, mixing Turkish and English linguistics to resist oppressive measures, using peaceful methods of resistance such as humour to counteract negative characterisation. Looking at the language used in the Gezi Park protests helps us understand the context of the movement, the demands being made by the protestors and their creativity. Faced with censorship, repression and lack of coverage from Turkish media and institutions, the language of the protestors adapted to resist and counteract these measures by seeking alternative platforms such as social media in which they could disseminate their message and gain international attention. Owing to the high presence of English in social media, the Gezi protestors created a whole vocabulary around çapulcu and used it in such a way as to accommodate English speakers and build an inclusive movement. The inclusivity stretched beyond the emergence of this linguistically hybrid culture and extend itself to the way in which people behaved during the occupation of Gezi Park. The language of the Gezi Park protests highlights the importance of humour, resistance and widespread inclusion in visualising peace.  

Read Ekin’s other blogs…

Why is language important when we talk about peace? 

Linguistic diversity and visibility for peace: education and community radio in Myanmar 

‘Lost in Translation’: Language, identity, and inner peace 

How do we visualise peace in English? 

Bibliography

Abbas, Tahir, and Ismail Hakki Yigit. “Scenes from Gezi Park: Localisation, Nationalism and Globalisation in Turkey.” City 19, no. 1 (November 4, 2014): 61–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2014.969070. 

Branagan, M. “The Last Laugh: Humour in Community Activism.” Community Development Journal 42, no. 4 (September 17, 2007): 470–81. https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsm037. 

Gasaway Hill, Mary Lynne. The Language of Protest. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77419-0. 

Jenzen, Olu, Itir Erhart, Hande Eslen-Ziya, Umut Korkut, and Aidan McGarry. “The Symbol of Social Media in Contemporary Protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park Movement.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27, no. 2 (July 6, 2020): 135485652093374. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520933747. 

Örs, İlay Romain, and Ömer Turan. “The Manner of Contention.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 41, no. 4-5 (February 13, 2015): 453–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453715568924. 

Seloni, Lisya, and Yusuf Sarfati. “Linguistic Landscape of Gezi Park Protests in Turkey.” Journal of Language and Politics 16, no. 6 (June 27, 2017): 782–808. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.15037.sel. 

Selvelli, Giustina. “Inscribing a New Space. Written Expressions of Utopia and Resistance during the Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul.” Etnološka Tribina 46, no. 39 (December 21, 2016): 94–125. https://doi.org/10.15378/1848-9540.2016.39.02. 

Walton, Jeremy F. “‘Everyday I’m Çapulling!’: Global Flows and Local Frictions of Gezi.” In JSTOR, edited by Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış, 45–58. Amsterdam University Press, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18z4hfn.7. 

Yanık, Lerna K. “Humour as Resistance?: A Brief Analysis of the Gezi Park Protest Graffiti.” In JSTOR, edited by Isabel David and Kumru F. Toktamış, 153–84. Amsterdam University Press, 2015. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt18z4hfn.14. 

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