Hazal Aydin

This research investigates why relatively privileged left-wing activists in Istanbul who possess cultural and social capital –education, language skills and transnational networks–but choose to risk themselves by actively engaging in resistance against the authoritarianism of Turkey’s President Erdoğan. Based on fifteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across Istanbul’s neighborhoods, I examine the political emotions, resistance practices, and structural positions that shape activists’ commitments. To understand why these activists maintain political and affective attachments to resistance in Turkey regardless of where they reside—whether they migrated and returned, live transnationally, or never left—I propose the concept of “staying with politics.” This shifts the analytical focus from where people stay to how they sustain political attachments to particular struggles. I argue that Turkey embodies one of the earlier manifestations of the global turn toward authoritarianism. Under rising authoritarianism, citizenship hierarchies are challenged, and even previously privileged, unmarked citizens become precarious when they dissent. This research examines how these structural transformations generate new forms of resistance and investigates the political emotions that motivate sustained activism. By studying Turkey’s ongoing authoritarian transformations and the resistances they fuel, this project illuminates the possibilities and contours of agentive action under increasingly repressive political conditions worldwide.