Murat Yesiltas

The Transformation of the Geopolitical Vision in Turkish Foreign Policy

Abstract By problematizing the relationship between geopolitics and foreign policy, this paper investigates the discursive assumptions of two different geopolitical visions of Turkish foreign policy. It seeks to explain how different political actors spatialize Turkeys geography and represent it as having a “different,” “exceptional,” and “unique” geopolitical position in the international system in order to justify foreign policy. By investigating how geopolitical representations produced in each of the different geopolitical vision serve to enable, restrict, and rationalize a different set of role choices for Turkey in the international system, the article is aiming to provide a critical geopolitical perspective in order to understand the discursive transformation of the geopolitical vision in the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) period.

Introduction: The Phenomenon of Non-state Armed Actors and Patterns of Violent Geopolitics in the Middle East

This introduction surveys some of the central themes and highlights their relevance to our understanding of the new dynamics of NSAAs before providing an overview of the contributions in the volume. While there exist various subspecies with peculiar characteristics, it outlines the main factors and recent developments that have contributed to the emergence and proliferation of NSAAs in the Middle East following the post-Arab Spring and the hyper-localization of Syrian Civil War. It then focuses on the debates about the NSAAs so as to provide a framework of analysis by highlighting the new components of non-state armed groups in the Middle East.

Conclusion: The State of the Non-state Armed Actors in the Middle East

This conclusion analyzes some of the central findings and their relevance to our understanding of the new dynamics of the NSAAs within the context of the Middle East geopolitics. It firstly focuses on the corrosive economic, political, and security structure of the Middle East by taking into consideration the impact of the non-state military actors. Second, it elaborates the question of how the NSAAs shape the new collective consciousness in the Middle East. Third, the paper highlights the impact of NSAAs on the issue of militarization and micro-dynamics of warfare including the recruitment patterns of the conflict in the Middle East. Lastly, the paper examines the consequences of the NSAAs on the paradoxical nature of the relationship between security provision and the state.

Global Politics of Image and the Making of a Legitimate Non-state Armed Actor: Syrian Kurds and ‘The Secular West’ in Kobane

The ISIS’s Kobane offensive and the belated US decision to intervene against the former on behalf of the Syrian Kurdish PYD forces who fight the ISIS during the Syrian civil war are in many ways an instructive yet puzzling case for students of international politics and security studies. The US intervention deviated from Obama’s earlier grand strategy of pivot to Asia-Pacific and steering clear of the new Middle East conflicts, most recently, involving the ISIS. The US and European states have also risked alienating powerful regional states, particularly those alarmed after Kobane at the prospect of an emerging independent state of Kurdistan bringing together in a dramatic fashion otherwise competing Kurdish forces in northern Iraq, Syria, and southern Turkey. How has this volte face become possible? This study argues that because it does not easily fit the contemporary geopolitical conditions in the Middle East, the implications of Kurdish struggle to retake Kobane and the following international intervention can be better understood as emanating from the politics of meaning-makings and pictorial representations. This paper investigates how ‘the secular Kurds’ and ‘the secular West’ are constituted in the Kurdish war against the ISIS. It shows how visuality and discourses of the Kobane war helped to construct self/other and humanism/barbarism in the relations between the Kurds, ISIS, and the West so as to shift political agenda and security policy in the Middle East.

Rethinking Kurdish geopolitical space: the politics of image, insecurity and gender

Abstract Global publics and local actors are increasingly saturated with variegated still and moving images. The important role played by images in world politics, however, remains understudied in the International Relations (IR) discipline. This article argues that the Kurdish geopolitical space is increasingly tied to a new regional and global imagination, which emanates from verbal–visual meaning-making strategies such as narrative reconstructions and pictorial representations (for example illustrations, pictograms, or photographs). The article’s investigation illustrates how the construction of new Kurdish geopolitical imagination became increasingly regionalized and internationalized during the war against the so-called Islamic State (IS), particularly after the Kobane siege in Syria in late 2014. It shows how the war between the Syrian Kurdish forces and the IS involved gendered and aesthetic signification for the global and regional audiences. Such strategies of meaning-making served as vital venues for gendering and making the threat of the IS and its “distant war” proximate, familiar and urgent for otherwise disinterested western audiences. These verbal–visual strategies vitally acted as a transmission belt between individual, state and systemic levels, turning the struggle against the IS into a globalized cultural-symbolic war. The article employs critical visual semiotics and critical discourse analysis to investigate the regional and global politics of image and offers three empirical cases to illustrate its argument: the narratives of the Kobane siege; the cartoon depicting a “Kurdish homeland” and globally circulated Kurdish female fighter photographs.

Representations of the Ergenekon Case in Turkey, 2007–11: Today's Zaman and Hürriyet Daily News

This article is based on an analysis of a two million-word corpus of news columns and op-eds in two Turkish news websites, those of Today’s Zaman (TZ) and the Hürriyet Daily News (HDN). The TZ is Zaman’s English language sister newspaper, which is now Turkey’s best-selling English language paper with 5,783 copies per day. The HDN, which has been a window for many foreigners to Turkey for over 45 years, sells 5,483 copies a day. The articles considered, all of which relate to the Ergenekon case, are examined using a corpus-based discourse analysis to elaborate on the representations of the events and the social groups involved. The comparative analysis of the keywords in each corpus was aimed at highlighting the lexis that was used most significantly in Today’s Zaman articles, when compared with the Hürriyet Daily News, and vice versa. The occurrences of keywords, retrieved by using Corpus Linguistics, were analyzed qualitatively through concordances and more contextual information then was brought into the analysis to investigate the data further. It was found that the TZ and the HDN differ strikingly in their representation of the Ergenekon case, which unsurprisingly relates to their overall historical connection to the political powers in Turkey.