Katartik resonans: Türkiye ve Brezilya'daki 2013 Haziran eylemlerinin etkileşimini açıklamak

This thesis is designed to explore whether the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey had any impact on the Jornadas de Junho Protests in Brazil by analyzing the perceptions and ideas of Brazilian protesters about the Gezi Park Protests. Starting with questioning the motivations and reasons behind the identifying references to the Gezi Park Protests made by Brazilian protesters during the Jornadas de Junho Protests in June 2013, the interaction between two protest movements is investigated through the semi-structured in-depth interviews with the Brazilian protesters. Since the theoretical studies in the field of protest diffusion cannot propose a comprehensive framework that can explain this case systematically, this thesis also seeks to discover novel mechanisms and theoretical explanations by employing Evolved Grounded Theory Methodology based on constant comparative method and a three-staged coding procedure. The findings reveal that a wide group of Brazilian protesters sympathetically identified themselves with the Turkish protesters based on their shared experience of intensification of violence during the protests. While Brazilian protesters had superficial and simplified knowledge on the contextual and motivational similarities between two movements, common patterns of the excessive use of force by the police against the protesters in both countries and the visibility of police violence against the Turkish protesters in local, international and social media had an inspiring and facilitating impact on the mobilization of Brazilian protesters following the initial emergence of the protests in Brazil. Based on these findings, this thesis introduces the mechanism of cathartic resonance, which can be defined as the stimulation of mass mobilization through sympathetic and superficial identification with a tragic protester group in a foreign but relatable context by the potential protesters in the host country.