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

Didem Turkoglu, New York University Abu Dhabi

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 show that past “failures” become a building block in how the movement actors position themselves in the field of higher education policy which enables different options for alliance-building.

See paper

 Presented in Session 166. Comparative analysis of political institutions