How eventful protest transforms individual trajectories of participation: cognitive, emotional, and relational liberations at the Gezi protests

This article examines how eventful protests reconfigure political trajectories by transforming how individuals think, feel, and relate through collective action. Drawing on life-history interviews with participants of the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, it develops an analytical framework that conceptualizes cognitive, emotional, and relational liberation as intertwined mechanisms of transformation. While research on activist trajectories has explored the effects of participation it has often treated transformation as a post-hoc outcome. This study instead investigates how transformation unfolds within participation itself, through the temporal and affective intensity of eventful protest. Findings reveal three differentiated yet interconnected trajectories of transformation, which emerge from the interaction between participants’ prior political biographies and their perception of the event’s affective and relational density. For those with no prior political experience, Gezi sparked an initial politicization through embodied participation. For experienced activists, it prompted a critical reassessment of ideological rigidity and organizational hierarchy. For long-term community organizers, it reaffirmed prefigurative practices, validating grassroots experiments and extending solidarity across urban and rural struggles. The article introduces the concept of relational liberation, demonstrating how embodied encounters across difference serve as the connective tissue between cognitive and emotional liberations, transforming shifts in perception and feeling into collective, enduring practices of political redefinition. Bridging eventfulness theory with processual-relational approaches of political participation, this study highlights how cognitive, emotional, and relational mechanisms translate eventful ruptures into lasting infrastructures of collective action under authoritarian constraint.