Scopus İndeksli Yayınlar Koleksiyonu
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12416/8651
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Article Citation - WoS: 2Citation - Scopus: 3Turkey's New Vision for "man's Best Hope for Peace": United Nations Reform and Reorganization of the Security Council(Center Foreign Policy & Peace Research, 2014) Atac, C. Akca; Atac, C. AkcaDespite its present reputation as weak, inefficient, and discreditable, the United Nations is one of humanity's most noble endeavors. Although the structure of the Security Council prevents its decision-making procedures from being more democratic, the UN still seeks to suppress aggression, respect self-determination, and promote human rights and well-being. Furthermore, political cosmopolitans' proposals for comprehensive UN reform, which goes far beyond increasing the number of permanent members of the Security Council, give us hope for substantial improvement. Nevertheless, the UN is still the sum of the states it is comprised of and UN reform depends on the broader and ambitious project of state reform as both concept and practice. Within this context, this paper argues that focusing exclusively on the Security Council and the geographical distribution of permanent membership only harms the comprehensiveness of the analyses seeking to reform the UN from a larger perspective. The fact that the success of a UN reform is closely related with the enhancement of member states' ethical capacities should also be taken into consideration. The next round of debates for a proper solution to the UN impasse takes place in 2015, and Turkey is emerging as an enthusiastic voice for further reform and for its own potential permanent membership in the Security Council. However, Turkey has also developed a significantly anti-UN discourse unprecedented in its foreign policy, which now runs the risk of curtailing the country's capacity to partake in substantial change in UN decision-making procedures. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu currently acts as a statesman, insisting on a statist reform (which focuses more on states' individual interests) of the Security Council. Interestingly, in the 1990s, when Davutoglu was a university professor, his views of the UN tended to be more cosmopolitan and suggested a civilization-based solution. This paper, while elaborating on the discussions of reforming the UN from a cosmopolitan perspective, also probes Davutoglu's conflicting approaches to the issue. It thus seeks to argue that Turkey, instead of pushing for a purely statist model, should consider supporting pluralistic, multi-level, and more-complex participation in the UN's decision-making procedures.Article Citation - WoS: 10Citation - Scopus: 15Pax Ottomanica No More! the "peace" Discourse in Turkish Foreign Policy in the Post-Davutoglu Era and the Prolonged Syrian Crisis(Wiley, 2019) Atac, C. AkcaTurkey's eight years between 2008 and 2016 has been dominated by Ahmet Davutoglu's vision of foreign policy, which was derived from his multi-edition book Strategic Depth (2000). In order to be able to present itself in its larger periphery as a pro-active, trustworthy actor, Davutoglu argued, Turkey needed to change the foreign-policy paradigms with which it was stranded. As the Strategic Depth vision unfolded, it drew explicit parallels between modern Turkey and the Ottoman neighborhood policy. Turkey-Syria relations since 2008 had been providing the seekers of neo-Ottomanist tendencies in the contemporary Turkish foreign policy with abundant examples, because Syria, once an Ottoman territory and always a challenge to modern Turkey, came to be the first poster country in the shift towards Turkey's imperial awakening. In the post-Davutoglu era, however, the rhetoric and practices of the past eight years seemed suddenly to disappear from the use of the Turkish agents of foreign policy; the new code of terms and actions to replace the Strategic Depth version is yet to be decided. This study seeks to pin down the neo-imperialist character of Turkey's foreign-policy discourse of the aforementioned eight years and contribute to discussions of the Turkish aspiration of neo-Ottomanism with focus on the Syrian crisis through the Justice and Development Party's re-invented peace discourse. In doing so, it aims to find out and elaborate on the current tendencies of Turkish foreign policy, which are no longer as explicit and articulated as they were during Davutoglu's ministry and prime ministry. As Turkey's cross-border operation to Syria - the Euphrates Shield - ends and another one in Idlib begins, a discursive analysis stretching from Davutoglu's diplomatic "zero problems" with Damascus to the military use of ground troops and air force is timely. Such an endeavor would be essential in understanding the spectacular swing from one edge to the other in Turkey's inclination over a phantasmagorical empire.