Making a People: Turkey’s “Democracy Watches” and Gezi-Envy

2020 ◽  
pp. 009059172098190
Author(s):  
Nazlı Konya
Keyword(s):  
Melanie Klein ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Popular Protest ◽  
The People ◽  
Electoral Power

This article investigates a surplus quality that a “politics out of doors” embodies. It argues that forms of mass appearance and protest manifest an aesthetic and affective making of a people—a people that enjoys its togetherness through visualized, vocalized, and performative expressions of its presence. Generating and generated by a collective desire, this figure of a people exceeds “the people” understood as a legally authorizing and legitimating entity. I contend that the excess of desire can make popular protest a source of “envy” for political authorities even at the height of their electoral power. In conversation with Melanie Klein and Joan Copjec’s accounts of “envy” and René Girard’s formulation of “mimetic desire,” I analyze the Turkish regime’s orchestration of the 2016 “Democracy Watches” as an attempt to create, harness, and appropriate a counter-equivalent desire to the 2013 antigovernment Gezi protests. In so doing, I reconceptualize peoplehood as the synergetic enjoyment of assembled collectivities.

Musical Propaganda in the Era of the Constitution

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-62
Author(s):  
Laura Lohman
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Financial Problems ◽  
Early American ◽  
Popular Protest ◽  
The People ◽  
The Government ◽  
Musical Propaganda ◽  
The Relationship

Focusing on the period 1783–1792, this chapter examines how music was used as a tool of propaganda in the early American republic. Americans used music to craft a central myth of the nation, the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Music was an important tool of propaganda as debates over how to address crucial financial problems impacting individuals, the states, and the federal government culminated in efforts to restructure the government through the Constitution. As advocates of a more powerful federal government repeatedly turned to musical propaganda, songwriters wrote music to contain popular protest, urge ratification, define the relationship between the people and the new federal government, and promote allegiance to the newly structured government during Washington’s first term as president.

Family Voting in France

1926 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-312
Author(s):  
Robert K. Gooch
Keyword(s):  
Church And State ◽  
The United States ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Single Issue ◽  
The People ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
History Of ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Electoral Power ◽  
Electoral Law

One of the results of the federal form of government of the United States, under which suffrage and elections are made primarily the concern of the several states, has been the comparatively small part played in practical national politics by controversies relating to voters and voting. The great reform bills and representation of the people acts in England, as well as the conditions in that country under which the acts were adopted, have no close parallels in American political history. Still less closely does the history of this country in these matters resemble that of France. The experience of the Third Republic has been filled with controversy concerning the organization of the electoral power. The limits to this organization are indeed set by the stipulation of the constitution that “the Chamber of Deputies shall be elected by universal suffrage”; but within these limits considerable latitude for change is assured by the qualifying phrase, “in the conditions determined by electoral law.” Change has been frequent, and change has been attended by the controversy mentioned. Thus, there have been since 1875 no fewer than five alternate adoptions of scrutin uninominal and scrutin de liste; and since the separation of church and state was consummated in the beginning of the present century, the question of electoral reform has probably been the chief single issue of internal French politics.

The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1820

1971 ◽  
Vol 76 (5) ◽  
pp. 1557
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer ◽  
R. C. Cobb
Keyword(s):  
Popular Protest ◽  
The People

scholarly journals Haunted by the Rebellion of the Poor: Civil Society and the Racialized Problem of the (Non-)economic Subject

2015 ◽  
pp. 52-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Selmeczi
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
South African ◽  
New South ◽  
Popular Protest ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The People ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Racialized Other ◽  
Apartheid Regime

Intrigued by the so-called “rebellion of the poor,” this paper traces back the current South African concern with popular protest to its reconfiguration during the last years of the apartheid order. Focusing on the discourse around grassroots resistance in the mid- to late-1980s, I begin by showing how, in juxtaposition to an ideal notion of civil society, popular mobilization had been largely delegitimized and the emancipatory politics of ungovernability recast as antidemocratic by the first few years of the post-apartheid regime. In deploying particular notions of violence and culture, this discursive shift, I suggest, fed into reconstructing the ungovernable subject as the racial other of the new South Africa’s citizenry. The second part of the paper mobilizes Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism to draw parallels between this process and the liberal effort to resolve the potentially conflicting principles of governing the economic subject and the subject of rights within the realm of civil society. Finally, via the postcolonial critique of liberal notions of civility and their rootedness in racial thinking, I suggest that civil society secures the governability of the population through rendering the potentially disruptive freedom of the people as the excess freedom of the racialized other.

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