Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship in Turkey; Or, the History of the Gezi Uprising Starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery

Abstract

This article focuses on the state confiscation of the Surp Hagop Armenian cemetery as more than just another fact about the famous 2013 protests in Gezi Park in Istanbul. In addition to coming to terms with the limits of the Gezi uprising in relation to its claims of inclusiveness, such a focus unravels the key tension between, on the one hand, progressive and left-wing calls to promote the allegedly equal, universal citizen in Turkey through protest movements and, on the other hand, the differential property regime on which the Turkish nation-state is founded, the denial of which continues to erode the possibility of equal citizenship. The article demonstrates how the systematic confiscation of Armenian property is normalized in everyday discourse and politics in Turkey in the service of the broader legal governance of minority difference.