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Ever Failed? Fail Again, Fail Better: Tuition Protests in Germany, Turkey, and the United States

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Student Movements in Late Neoliberalism

Part of the book series: Social Movements and Transformation ((SMT))

Abstract

At the turn of the millennium, multiple countries erupted in student protests against tuition hikes in public universities. Despite arising in varying political contexts, these protests followed remarkably similar paths to achieving concessions. In this chapter, I compare student protests against tuition hikes across three different welfare state types: Germany, Turkey, and the United States. I argue that the crucial commonality across these cases was the formation of unexpected alliances made possible by the failures of past movements. I offer a meso-level analysis of past “failures” that empowered strategic intentions through activists’ collective memory work. These positions offered new possibilities for brokerage, enabled and constrained different alliance configurations, especially with labor unions and civil society organizations. The legacy of the 1960s and the 1990s influenced the pathways available to the student activists in the 2000s.

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Acknowledging Note

I would like to thank Neal Caren, Charlie Kurzman, Andy Andrews, Karam Hwang, Lorenzo Cini, and Cesar Guzmán-Concha for their insightful comments and suggestions regarding earlier drafts of this paper. I am grateful to İsmet Akça, Fred Block, Charlie Eaton, Thomas Sablowski, and Sabrina Zajak for their help in establishing contact with my interviewees, helping with fieldwork visa applications, and accessing data. Research fellowships from the European Union/Center for European Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Graduate School partially supported the fieldwork for this research.

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  1. New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Didem Türkoğlu

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  1. Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Florence, Italy

    Lorenzo Cini

  2. Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Florence, Italy

    Donatella della Porta

  3. Institute of Citizenship Studies, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    César Guzmán-Concha

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Türkoğlu, D. (2021). Ever Failed? Fail Again, Fail Better: Tuition Protests in Germany, Turkey, and the United States. In: Cini, L., della Porta, D., Guzmán-Concha, C. (eds) Student Movements in Late Neoliberalism. Social Movements and Transformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75754-0_11

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