Inappropriable Force - by Nazlı & Konya

About the Book

Explores Turkey's 2013 Gezi Uprising to theorize protest as a political meaning-making practice irreducible to sovereign claims.

Book Synopsis

In the aftermath of the global mass protests of the 2010s, democratic theorists have shown renewed interest in conceptualizing popular mobilization and "the people." A series of provocative works have theorized assembled crowds in the streets as sources of democratic authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty. These insightful accounts nevertheless often remain detached from the full range of the situated experiences of protesters.

Inappropriable Force brings the concrete, on-the-ground practices of Turkey's 2013 Gezi Uprising into the foreground of theoretical reflection, asking what people gathered in the streets shared, desired, or refused, and what their public experimentations with politics, language, and aesthetics made possible. Working from the empirical particularities of Gezi to political theory, the book theorizes protest as a political meaning-making enterprise that reconfigures everyday regimes of sense, speech, and engagement.

Drawing on Gezi's archives and engaging democratic and critical theorists such as Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Joan Copjec, and René Girard, the book identifies a surplus in protest irreducible to the categories of popular sovereignty, authorization, or legitimation. This surplus--an inappropriable force--can only be experienced in practice, through collective action. Not predicated on unified will or hegemonic claims to peoplehood, it unfolds in plural modes of thinking, sociality, affect, creativity, and imagination that emerge when people assemble out of doors.

Adopting a practice-oriented and deparochializing approach, Inappropriable Force treats the political activities and cultural artifacts of the Gezi protests as texts of political theory in their own right. In doing so, it conceptualizes popular protest as a generative reservoir of political meaning and critical insight.

Review Quotes

"Inappropriable Force offers a compelling, beautifully written, and theoretically rich account of popular action, exposing how analytical frameworks predicated on popular sovereignty produce impoverished readings of protest. Focusing on Gezi and theorizing from the ground up, Konya deftly shows how novel resistance practices often refuse the very language and premises of the state."---Çiğdem Çıdam, Union College

"Konya distinctively theorizes inappropriability in protesters' lived material practices of play and humor. The book offers something genuinely new to the study not only of protest but of democratic theory more generally."---Lida Maxwell, Boston University

About the Author

Nazlı Konya is Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College.