446 Resisting Publics
and associating them with specific practices and meanings, this repertoire
thus arguably contributes to enlarging the public sphere. Here again, the
presence of migrants and outsiders is decisive in the shaping and framing
of contentious performances.^51 As they experience other rules of public-
ness and associated practical knowledge, their regime of engagement in
a situation (whether at a checkpoint, during a demonstration, or some
other event) and their apprehending of regulating agents may differ from
that of inhabitants. In fact, their specific discursive and practical resources
allow them to innovate and adapt their responses, which may have an
influence on inhabitants’ and security forces’ behavior.
On the other hand, this expansion of the public sphere is countered
by immediate limitations: first, state agents are not about to tolerate any
bridging of frames, such as by coupling the collective action over environ-
mental issues with another politically loaded issue. Though they may have
allowed more public displays of diversity and alterity, they also empha-
sized pressure on and stigmatization of specific targets: In July 2004,
state security forces heavily sanctioned and indiscriminately repressed a
march to the Munzur intended to draw attention to Turkish revolution-
ary activists dying from hunger-strike in prisons. State forces continued
to exercise their power, both to define the borders of legitimate public
space and, within it, to differentiate among more or less legitimate causes.
For example, in his 26 April 2005 speech, the then-governor of Tunceli
celebrated the first steps of the construction of a rehabilitation center for
handicapped persons, funded by people from Tunceli (especially migrants
settled in Europe) and diverse donors (among them the then-President
of the National Assembly). The governor took that occasion to publicly
attack the dam campaign: “Certain civil associations should follow this
example and do something concrete rather than criticizing what they
have. They talk about the dams and cyanide but they don’t know about
details. They should know well what is positive for our province and
only after should they criticize!” This cooptation of what reconstruction
and modernity should be in Tunceli against other perspectives is, again,
revealing in terms of the renewed state strategy to regulate urban space.