Gol, Ayla ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8026-8888 (2024) The Geo-Positioning of Turkey in Eurasia in the 21st Century. Journal of Anglo-Turkish Relations, 5 (2).

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Abstract

Looking through the lens of critical geopolitics, the article challenges Turkey’s so-called ‘bridge’ position
and the binary opposition of Europe and Asia by arguing that the vision of Turkish foreign policy has been
imagined geographically and geopositioned contextually. In this article, for the first time, I apply the term
‘geopositioning’ to describe Turkey’s ‘in-between’ geographical location between Europe and Asia by
evaluating geostrategic, geoeconomics and geopolitical variables together from a new perspective. I argue that
Turkey’s evolving foreign policy towards Eurasia is a consequence of the Ankara governments’ search for an
alternative vision that led to geopositioning in post-Cold War international relations. Therefore, the article
critically analyses whether the goals of Turkish foreign policy were shaped by material or ideational interests
and how they influenced Turkey’s geopositioning in Eurasia. For the last two decades, the change of traditional
Turkish foreign policy by evolving multi-dimensionally and engaging actively in the Caucasus, Central Asia, the
Middle East, and North Africa has been the empirical evidence of such geopositioning. After describing a new
theoretical framework in the introduction and summarizing emerging opportunities in post-Cold War
international politics, the second part examines the implementation of multidimensional foreign policy under the
Justice and Development Party (AKP) leadership since 2002. The article concludes that the geopositioning of
Turkey in the twenty-first century has been shaped by both material and ideational interests and evolved
paradoxically around collaboration and competition with Russia, China, and Iran.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
Subjects:	J Political Science > JZ International relations
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/10243

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