Like Scattered Pomegranate Seeds

This article analyses the impact of repression on activism by focusing on the case of Turkish extreme-leftist activists of 1970s after the military coup held in 1980. I elaborate on the consequences of military repression on one mass organization, Devrimci-Yol (DY), and on its militants’trajectories, while exploring, more generally, how repression could change the forms and the intensity of engagement. The social construction of exit and voice by the DY militants who suffered from repression constitutes the main theme of this article, which covers three levels of analysis: contextual, organizational and individual. The article aims to demonstrate that the effects of repression depend as much on the forms of repression itself as on the initial resources of militants who are victims of it, on the space of mobilization and on the socio-political transformations that occur in Turkey during this period.