This study investigates the role of English-speaking Turkish media in accounting for the protests in Taksim. We applied a combined quantitative and qualitative methodology to five highly accessed online newspapers, with the aim of exploring how events were reported to the international audience. The resulting picture reveals a variety of media discourses, dominated though by a lack of analyses of the motivations for the protest: Gezi is not portrayed as having potential to be a fully democratic, national mobilization. References to other contemporary social movements are made instrumentally, in accordance with the newspaper’s editorial line. We conclude that while mainstream media did not transmit the “message” of the protest beyond Gezi, social networks have reconnected the center and the periphery of the social movement.

With some element of introspection, I can disclose that communication for development has not only played a big role, but it has also been a big part of my immigrant life in Sweden. Half of my eleven years in this country have been spent engaging both in the academic study and pragmatic applications of communication for development to varying degrees.