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Remember Occupy Wall Street? The leaderless "movement" built around anger at income inequality and the power of corporate interests in US politics that faded as winter came to New York and failed to build a coherent political approach to change?

Well, the slogan lives on. The latest protests to receive the "occupy" brand are the Turkish ones that erupted after a harsh police crackdown on a sit-in protesting the government's plans to destroy Gezi Park in central Istanbul and replace it with a shopping mall. Over the weekend, the protests became about far more than Istanbul's dwindling green spaces, with grievances ranging from the heavy-handed leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to concerns about unrestrained capitalism, Islamist-motivated crackdowns on alcohol consumption, and police brutality. Since, #occupygezi has proven one of the most popular hash tags on Twitter.

The grievances are visibly real, and the protests are Turkey's most wide-ranging for decades. But recent history has shown that leaderless protests are far better at illustrating what they don't like than what they want and how to get there. On Friday, when the Gezi Park encampment was attacked and the broader protests started in response, I wrote: "Branding your protest as an 'occupy' is a leading indicator that it won't accomplish much."

This is not a generally-popular sentiment in the Twitterverse. But political change happens elsewhere, and today comes some support from someone who, unlike me, actually knows something about Turkey. Stephanie Soiffer, a PhD candidate in international affairs at Ottawa's Carleton University wrote a master's thesis on "Explaining varying patterns of compliance with human rights law in Turkey." She writes that the "Occupy love-ins degenerated into shantytowns that marred often previously pristine public spaces and that unfortunately, as time wore on, attracted larger and larger proportions of hooligans and extremists" and that she doubts the approach will work to change much in Turkey:

For now, Prime Minister Erdogan is defiant and dismissive of the protesters – unwilling to bend on the determination to destroy Gezi Park, let alone on anything else, and warning that he could swamp the current protesters with far more supporters of his own if it comes to it. And with no political group as yet to channel and prioritize demands, it remains easy, if offensive, for the prime minister to dismiss his critics as a rabble.

Probably the best overview of the state of Turkish politics and how it plays into these protests that I've seen so far was written by Steven Cook and Michael Koplow for Foreign Policy this morning. They explain how Erdogan's Turkey isn't as democratic as it's often portrayed by US officials. While they place most of the blame on Erdogan's ruling AKP, they also write that the opposition has made the ruling party's task far easier.