Islamic proletariat & the new middle class dynamics in the context of Gezi park protests in neoliberal Turkey

---

Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, İktisadi ve İdari Bilimler Fakültesi, Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2015

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: ÖZGÜR YALÇIN

Asıl Danışman (Eş Danışmanlı Tezler İçin): Mehmet Okyayuz, Helga İda Rittersberger Tılıç

Özet:

Considering the rudiments of neoliberalism; hierarchy, stratification, and thus inequality must be continuously reproduced, in which the analytical and empirical importance of ‘class’ cannot be denied. Bear in mind, Gezi Park protests, which were the most prominent civil uprisings, revealed particular structural staples of neoliberal Turkey – one of the critical is the class dynamics. Accordingly, the primary concern of this thesis offers an examination of Islamic proletariat and the new middle classes (secular & Islamic) in a critical way. Furthermore, the fragmentation of the working class, the relations between the state and the social classes, and how these classes positioned themselves during Gezi are further issues discussed from a sociohistorical perspective. In this sense, Gezi is detected as a breaking point rather than a singular reality by itself. Consequently, it is argued that neoliberalism has been struggling for continuing its hegemony through Islam because of the growing size of secular new middle class, which was manifested by Gezi. Dialectical critical realism constitutes the methodological structure of this research. Critical literature review and analysis of secondary data/statistics are used with a support of in-depth interviews with leading scholars conducted in the summer of 2015.