Turkey witnessed a period of intense street protests and clashes that rose and fell from the late 1960s until the coup d'etat held in September 1980, with student protests entering a new and extremely violent phase in the mid-1970s. Based on a systematic content analysis of newspapers and interviews with the militants of the decade, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the period as a wave or cycle of protest by focusing on the actors, forms of actions used and the goals of protest events.

In this first major, academic study of the period, the author examines the relationship between the development of the wave of protest and the general political structure in Turkey in the 1970s, thus providing new insights into Turkish socio-political culture. Analysing the emergence and the dynamics of a violent phase of contention and discussing the more recent Gezi Park protests, Protest and Politics in Turkey in the 1970s brings together several bodies of scholarship and will appeal to social scientists with interests in social movements, Turkish politics and studies of regime change.