Mustafa Kutlay

The Dynamics of Emerging Middle Power Influence in Regional and Global Governance: The Paradoxical Case of Turkey

This article strives to understand the properties, potentials and limits of middle power activism in a changing global order. Extensive debate on the rise of emerging powers notwithstanding, the potential contributions of emerging middle powers in regional and global governance and the imminent challenges they face in their struggle for an upgraded status in the hierarchy of world politics is an understudied issue. This study aims to fill this gap by offering a broad conceptual framework for middle power activism and testing it with reference to the Turkish case. In this context, we aim to address the following questions: what kind of roles can emerging middle powers play in a post-hegemonic international system? What are the dynamics, properties, and limitations of emerging middle power activism in regional and global governance? Our central thesis is that emerging middle powers can make important contributions to regional and global governance. Their ultimate impact, however, is not inevitable but depends on a complementary set of conditions that is outlined in this study.

The Arab Spring: A Game Changer in Turkey-EU Relations?

We argue in this paper that the Arab Spring has opened a window of opportunity not just to create stability and democracy in one of the most unstable regions of the world, but also for revitalizing Turkey-EU relations. In theory, Turkey-EU cooperation can make a decisive difference in determining the outcome of the triangular relationship between stability, development, and democratization in the Arab region. In normative terms, as an opportunity, it must be turned into an advantage. From a practical perspective, however, transforming the window of opportunity into policy output is linked to the policy leadership of the sides involved to undergo a paradigm shift in their approach to the region and toward one another.

Internationalization of finance capital in Spain and Turkey: Neoliberal globalization and the political economy of state policies

This study applies the proactive/reactive state framework to the transformation of Spanish and Turkish finance capital in a comparative perspective. It concludes that the “proactive” policies pursued by the Spanish state and the strategic coalition established between political elites and the integrationist segments of finance capital resulted in the heterodox internationalization of Spanish firms, whereas the “reactive” state policies in Turkey, designed in line with orthodox neoliberal dictums, paved the way for an incomplete internationalization. The 2007/2008 crisis, however, demonstrates that the same state may be both proactive and reactive across various policy fields over time. The recent Spanish financial crisis and Turkey’s regulatory success after 2001 illustrate this point.

Neo-developmentalist turn in the global political economy? The Turkish case

ABSTRACT The 2008 global economic crisis galvanized the debate on neo-developmentalism as the pendulum of economic thinking began to swing away from neoliberalism. The current shift in the modalities of market governance mainly deals with the ways through which industrial policies can be crafted in a more open-economy setting. Accordingly, the post-crisis literature turns a keen eye on the state’s developmental role in the research and development (R&D) sector in an age of ‘bit-driven’ global political economy. On that note, the nature, properties, and limits of state policies of emerging powers in this particular realm are becoming increasingly central but remain an understudied theme. This article discusses the R&D policies of Turkey from a state capacity perspective and questions the rationale of those policies by linking the state’s transformative capacity to the discussions on distributive pressures. Drawing on 21 in-depth semi-structured interviews, this article assesses Turkey’s R&D policies.

Is the American century over

makers, in order to influence policymaking in the long run. It is worth noting that this book focuses on the security practices of multinational companies operating in the context of joint extraction, while excluding cases in which the states dominate the extractive industries. Moreover, as the author argues, security governance by the companies from rising powers could generate more variables. If this book could take the emerging economies’ involvement in the security government of both South Africa and the DRC, its arguments would be more inclusive. Overall, Transnational companies and security governance does an excellent job of revealing the hybrid nature of security governance exercised by multinational mining companies in Africa. It is one of the most deeply researched and detailed accounts of transnational security governance in Africa. Scholars, policy-makers, general readers and students of Africa studies and international relations have much to learn from this fine book.

Beyond the Global Financial Crisis: Structural Continuities as Impediments to a Sustainable Recovery

There has scarcely been a day in the last three years when we have not read depressing headlines in the newspapers about the global economic crisis. The current turmoil, which many experts concur in seeing as the worst jolt to the world economy since the Great Depression, is pushing the parameters of the established system to its limits. One could say that we see, in the short-term measures taken against the crisis at the time, an effective anti-crisis strategy. But ironically, the promptness with which these short-term measures were enacted prevented adequate questioning of the dominant paradigm which had caused the crisis. As a result, the structural problems leading to the crisis were not abated. Despite the occurrence of the deepest economic crisis to be experienced since the Great Depression, the present economic emergency did not shake the neoclassical economic paradigm as strongly as was needed. A puzzle that this study aims to solve arises here: Why and how has the conventional wisdom survived and reproduced its intellectual hegemony even after the “most devastating economic crisis” since the Great Depression?