Critical readings of Turkey’s foreign policy

Southeast European and Black Sea Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fbss20 Critical readings of Turkey’s foreign policy edited by Birsen Erdoğan and Fulya Hisarlıoğlu, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, XXI, 322 pp., €49.99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-3-030-97636-1, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-97637-8 Çağla Lüleci-Sula To cite this article: Çağla Lüleci-Sula (2022): Critical readings of Turkey’s foreign policy, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14683857.2022.2137895 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2022.2137895 Published online: 18 Oct 2022. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fbss20 SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN AND BLACK SEA STUDIES BOOK REVIEW Critical readings of Turkey’s foreign policy, edited by Birsen Erdoğan and Fulya Hisarlıoğlu, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, XXI, 322 pp., €49.99 (hardback), ISBN: 978-3-030-97636-1, DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-97637-8 The argument that ‘The study of foreign policy has been highly unaffected by the critical insights offered by post-positivism’ was put forward by Doty (1993) in the early years of the post-Cold War era. Although constructivist interventions have become more common since then, it is safe to argue that positivist approaches still dominate the analysis of foreign policy. Edited by Birsen Erdogan and Fulya Hisarlioglu, Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy makes a timely contribution to this evolving literature with its attempt to bring together multiple scholars from Turkey to discuss different aspects of Turkey’s place in the world and its relations with other states through a ‘critical’ perspective. The book presents a notable effort not only because of the challenges posed by critically analyzing Turkey’s policy decisions, but also because criticality is easier to talk about at the meta-theoretical level, but it is rather challenging to conduct empirical analysis through a critical lens. In the introduction, the editors express the commitment of all chapters to ‘constructivist epistemology,’ criticality, reflexivity, scepticism of knowledge claims, and denial of positivist assumptions. The book sets two main goals: studying foreign policy ”in a meaningful academic way by using critical approaches;” and producing empirically informed studies (p. 2). The book consists of four main parts: 1. Turkey in the modern international, 2. Turkey’s Imagined Communities/Geographies, 3. Articulating new and old friends, 4. Limbo of (in)security, all of which adopts ‘critical International Relations approaches’ (p. vii). The first part has three chapters, all of which refer to the historical construction of identities while also scrutinizing Turkey’s relations with ‘the West.’ Çapan analyses Turkey’s place in the ‘modern’ international context which she defines as a colonial project. Providing examples from Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, the author problematizes the production of sameness and difference and criticizes the binaries through which the international is narrated. In the next chapter, Hisarlıoğlu analyses revisionist and statusquo-oriented discourses in Turkish foreign policy to elaborate on Turkey’s geopolitical imaginations. Like Çapan, Hisarlıoğlu also goes back to the pre-Cold War years to understand the temporal character of Turkish foreign policy identity. In the last chapter of this section, Aksu and Özer analyse Turkish foreign policy in the AKP era by adopting a levels of analysis framework and integrating Wallerstein’s concept of geo-culture into the analysis. The second part starts with Güner’s analysis of the imagination of Africa in multiple communities in Turkey. The author points to different maps of Africa in the imaginations of multiple circles in Turkey, highlighting various relations of inclusion of exclusion. Then, Küçük and Dikmen examine how political actors in Turkey understand and make sense of the Global South as ‘a zone of lack’ with references to their discourses. The authors adopt a postcolonial perspective in problematizing the particularistic representations of the Global South in different contexts. In the next chapter, Mandacı goes back to the early 2000s and analyses how Turkey’s greater role in its neighbourhood had been supported by what the authors call the liberal elites of the country. In that sense, the first decade of the 2000s was seen as a turning point in history, in terms of these hopes to re-narrate the Ottomanist 2 BOOK REVIEW view of the state to attach a more positive meaning to it, which would also contribute to the intellectual sphere. The following three chapters in the next part look at the dynamic relations between Turkey and multiple other states in the last twenty years. Eliküçük Yıldırım develops a critical analysis of Turkey’s ‘dual strategy’ in its relations with China by utilizing the concept of ‘liminality.’ This dual strategy refers to Turkey’s embracement of its liminal position in between being a ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern/Asian’ country. Similarly, Akça Ataç analyses the relations between Turkey and Russia by highlighting the domination-subordination axis in contrast to the discourse of friendship at the leadership level. The author adopts a gender perspective by also touching upon the discussions on ‘emotional IR’ by bringing the concept of hegemonic masculinity into the analysis. The last chapter of this section presents an examination of Turkey’s fluctuating relations with the EU and rising Euroscepticism in Turkey in the last twenty years. More specifically, Güney suggests that the power of populist leaders on both sides has resulted in mutual antipathy through the constant reproduction of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. The last section of the book is marked by a few different approaches to security to analyse various aspects of Turkish foreign policy. First, Baysal and Dizdaroğlu turn their focus on securitization and de-securitization in Turkey-Greece relations by drawing attention to changes in Turkey, its bureaucracy, and the ruling elite. In the second chapter, Kınacıoğlu presents a rigorous analysis of Turkey’s cross-border military operations through a critical constructivist perspective. Going beyond existing strategic and political explanations, the author argues that a multi-layered analysis of how Turkey’s interests, identity, and security are constantly constituting each other has the potential to better grasp the foreign policy decisions of states. In the last chapter, Erdoğan examines Turkish elites’ discourses on Libya and Syria in the early 2010s adopting a post-structuralist perspective. The author concludes that a state’s decision for military intervention mostly depends on its political elites’ articulation of the situation/crisis as a threat or opportunity. The editors have put a significant effort into bringing these divergent approaches and analyses together under the umbrella of criticality. However, they could not completely escape the trap of generalizing what ‘critical’ looks like and what it aims to do. Although they highlight the multiplicity of critical approaches and that critical approaches are not monolithic in the conclusion chapter, it is still possible to detect strong assumptions made about ‘the critical way’ of analysing things (i.e., positioning in the agent-structure debate, the ethical stance of critical approaches, the conceptualizations of state). It is also safe to argue that although all authors successfully put forward their ‘dissatisfaction with the current state of the things’ (p. 306), not every chapter in the book has the same level of commitment to post-positivism as a metatheoretical stance. Nevertheless, both editors and the authors are successful in highlighting at least two significant aspects of a constructivist ontology, ‘change’ and ‘mutual constitution,’ which is a significant contribution to the foreign policy analysis literature. The book is advanced in content, assumes prior knowledge of foreign policy analysis and critical theory concepts, and, therefore, is a suitable source for graduate students and experienced researchers studying foreign policy. SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN AND BLACK SEA STUDIES 3 Reference Doty, R.L. 1993. Foreign policy as a social construction a post-positivist analysis of U.S. counterinsurgency policy in the Philippines. International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3: 297–320. doi:10.2307/2600810. Çağla Lüleci-Sula Department of Political Science and International Relations, Ted University [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0534-8271 © 2022 Çağla Lüleci-Sula https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2022.2137895