Social media as a space for contentious politics in the age of rising authoritarianism: a comparative analysis of academic resistance in Hungary and Turkey

This paper examines student and faculty online activism as a response to declining democratic conditions and rising pressures over the character and political direction of universities in a time of rising authoritarianism. Turkey and Hungary represent examples of two countries that have both experienced democratic decline and further deterioration of academic freedoms and university autonomy (Bárd, 2020; Doğan & Selenica, 2021; Dönmez & Duman, 2020). Simultaneously, there are signs that some university spaces still maintain autonomous spaces through political actions energised by students and faculty to resist such authoritarianism (Brooks, 2016; Klemenčič, 2014). In Turkey, the culmination of online contentions has been the reaction to the Rector appointment by the government to Bogaziçi University in January 2019. Since 2016, following a state emergency decree, Erdogan began to appoint loyalists and activists of ruling AKP to the position of University Rector, without input from university stakeholders that constrained university autonomy and was interpreted as an interference into university decision-making (Dönmez & Duman, 2020). Student and faculty resistance to this appointment has taken place both on campus grounds and online on Twitter by hashtags: #KabulEtmiyoruzVazgecmiyoruz (#wedontacceptwedontgiveup) and #direnbogazici (#resistbogazici). In Hungary, students at the University of Theatre and Film Arts have occupied the university as a protest to the privatization of this school against the decision of the university senate in September 2020. This university is the seventh case in Hungary that has been transferred to the control of a pro-government private foundation funded and governed by the ruling Fidesz leader Orbán (Csoszó, 2020). The protests have been extensively discussed and organized on social media using the hashtag #FREESZFE on Twitter. This paper explores the idea of universities as spaces for contentious politics that can ignite mobilizations, support and coordinate political contestation (Tarrow, 2011; Tilly, 2015). We draw in particular on the concept of “infrastructure of dissent” (Sears, 2005, 2014) in order to explore how contentious politics is organized in universities with a particular focus on social media is used and mobilised by protesters and their governments. While the tools that governments use against political activism in HE, including surveillance, control and repression, have been researched to some extent (Altbach, 2017; Choudry, 2015; Choudry, 2019; Dillabough, 2021), the organization and development of academics’ resistance have been much less researched, particularly in the case of rising authoritarianism when student and academic activists face imprisonment, police brutality and potential death. In light of these considerations, this paper examines how contentious politics organized in universities under deteriorating democratic conditions and how Twitter is used to communicate in both case sites. We argue that social media analysis of activist practice serves as an important platform for examining the scope and spread of discontent in academia. Using netnography as a qualitative analysis tool (Costello et al., 2017), we draw on a hashtag analysis to track how Twitter 1) is drawn upon to mobilize dissent and form networks of activist alliances, 2) communicate this dissent transnationally, and 3) as a method of surveillance and repression tool of governments.