Search

Begin New Search Topic International Relations Journal Uluslararasi Iliskiler

11. Going Beyond the Add-and-Stir Critique: Tracing the Hybrid Masculinist Legacies of the Performative State

Author:
Amya Agarwal
Publication Date:
08-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
A West-centric knowledge bias has plagued International Relations (IR) for some time, prompting many non-West scholars to develop indigenous knowledge systems. In doing so, there is, however, a risk of both essentialization of certain cultures/histories; and reproducing the hierarchic and exclusionary structure of knowledge production. Moving beyond the add and stir critique style of non-Western approaches to IR, this paper explores the significance of connections and hybrid histories to understand gendered state practices. Through a case study of state performance in Kashmir, the paper traces the hybrid masculinist legacies (colonial, Brahminical and Kshatriya) derived from both Western and non-Western histories.
Topic:
International Relations, Gender Issues, Governance, State Building, and Masculinity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

12. Challenging International Relations’ Conceptual Constraints: The International and Everyday Life across Borders in Southern Africa

Author:
Karen Smith
Publication Date:
08-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
One of the critiques of International Relations (IR) is that the discipline’s discursive boundaries are particularly rigid and continue to be shaped and maintained by dominant Western-centric concepts and discourses. This paper explores the apparent dichotomy between how concepts like ‘the international’ are interpreted by IR scholars and the experiences of ordinary people on which these concepts are imposed. How people engage with borders will be used as an illustration, with borders being regarded by IR scholars as constituting important boundaries that are essential to the field’s understanding of the world as consisting of neatly separated sovereign, territorial states. Two examples that highlight the arbitrary nature of national borders in Africa draw these assumptions into question and suggest that defining what does or does not constitute the international is, in reality, much more complex than suggested by the theoretical abstractions found in standard IR texts.
Topic:
International Relations, Sovereignty, International Relations Theory, and Borders
Political Geography:
Africa and Southern Africa

13. The New British Colonialism: British Policy of Influence in the Arab Gulf States after the Withdrawal (1971-1991)

Author:
Selin M. Bolme and Mevlut Cavusoglu
Publication Date:
03-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
This paper aims to analyze Britain’s relations with the former colonies in the Gulf after the termination of the British protectorate in the Persian Gulf and discuss how the British colonial ties influenced the post-colonial relations with the Arab Gulf States. Archive documents, official papers and secondary sources were used in order to determine and compare the relations in pre/post withdrawal periods and the results were analyzed in frame of the Post-colonial theory. The main argument of this study is that the British colonial relations and ties, which had been constructed in political, military, economic and institutional spheres in the colonial era, were significant determinants in reshaping the new British foreign policy towards the Arab Gulf States. Britain, who successfully adopted the colonial relations in the new term, managed to preserve its interests after the withdrawal and even extended some of them in certain fields such as the oil sector.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, History, and Colonialism
Political Geography:
Britain, Europe, and Persian Gulf

14. Immigration Policy as Foreign Policy

Author:
Howard Duncan
Publication Date:
12-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
Immigration policy has taken centre stage in the social sciences over the past 20 years. Despite the proliferation of articles and books in this field, very little attention has been paid to immigration policy as foreign policy. It is domestic policy that prevails in the literature, most notably about the effects of immigration on destination societies. This article distinguishes the domestic and foreign policy aspects of immigration policy, acknowledging as it does so that foreign policy is virtually always an expression of national self-interest. It concludes with observations on the realist and idealist/liberal approaches to international relations theory including with respect to the recently adopted United Nations Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees. Its purpose is to draw attention to this neglected aspect of immigration policy and to encourage others to explore it in greater detail, from the perspectives of both individual states and the world’s international institutions.
Topic:
International Relations, Foreign Policy, Migration, Sovereignty, United Nations, Immigration, and Border Control
Political Geography:
Global Focus

15. Civil Society in a De Facto State-Northern Cyprus: Societal Dissent, Turkish Cypriot Trade Unions and Relations with Turkey

Author:
Ibrahim Ayberk, Sait Akşit, and Ali Dayioğlu
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
This study presents the importance of patron states for de facto states within the context of Turkey-Northern Cyprus relations intending to highlight how and in what ways the Turkish Cypriot civil society is influenced by this relationship. It analyses the societal dissent in Northern Cyprus through a detailed study of the leading role played by trade unions given the conjectural developments since the early 2000s and argues that this differentiates Northern Cyprus from other de facto states. With the case analysis of Northern Cyprus, this study aims to contribute to the gap on the study of de facto states’ domestic affairs and the influence of patron states on the societal structures of these entities.
Topic:
International Relations, Civil Society, State, Emerging States, and Unions
Political Geography:
Turkey, Middle East, Cyprus, and Mediterranean

16. Turkey between Qatar and Saudi Arabia: Changing Regional and Bilateral Relations

Author:
Birol Baskan
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
This paper discusses how Turkey’s bilateral relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar have changed after the Arab Spring erupted and assesses how the Syrian conflict affected them. The paper argues that Turkey had developed excellent relations with Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the 2000s, but eventually fell out with Saudi Arabia and strengthened its relations with Qatar as the Arab Spring unfolded. The Syrian conflict, in which the three countries colluded to overthrow the Assad regime, has alleviated the deleterious impact of the differences between Saudi Arabia and Turkey on the bilateral relations or, to put it in another way, slowed down the deterioration of Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations. The paper also argues that the geopolitical landscape that pushed Turkey and Saudi Arabia apart also pushed Turkey and Qatar closer.
Topic:
International Relations, Regional Cooperation, Bilateral Relations, and Geopolitics
Political Geography:
Turkey, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Qatar

17. A Dance of Entanglement: The US-Turkish Relations in the Context of the Syrian Conflict

Author:
Burcu Sari Karademir
Publication Date:
08-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
Alliances under unipolarity operate with different logic than under bipolarity. Unipolarity makes the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment more likely for the weaker states that need the unipole for the pursuit of their regional security interests. The article takes the US-Turkish relations within the context of Syrian conflict as exemplary and shows how the strategic discrepancies between the US-Turkish positions paved the way for Turkey’s abandonment in Syria. The article concludes that the unipole’s strategic alliance commitments are no longer reliable for regional allies to assume risky regional restructuring roles as they face the risk of abandonment on the halfway.
Topic:
International Relations, Alliance, Syrian War, and Unipolarity
Political Geography:
Turkey, Middle East, Syria, United States of America, and Mediterranean

18. Rethinking International Security: Feminist Critiques in International Relations

Author:
Ayşe Ömür Atmaca and Pınar Gozen Ercan
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
The discipline of International Relations (IR) has defined its boundaries through masculine terms, which makes women and gender relations hardly visible. Nevertheless, women have always been an inseparable part of interstate relations, and the world’s most important problems cannot be treated separately from gender politics. On grounds of the basic assumptions of feminist IR theories, the aim of this study is to analyse how feminism offers new ways to understand contemporary issues of international security. In this vein, feminist IR literature is analysed from the perspective of security, and feminist critiques are exemplified through the concept of the “Responsibility to Protect”.
Topic:
International Relations, Security, Feminism, and Responsibility to Protect (R2P)
Political Geography:
Global Focus

19. Opportunity and Willingness as a Pre-Theoretical Framework in Explaining Wars

Author:
Burak Bilgehan Özpek
Publication Date:
01-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
Grand theories of international relations seek to produce general patterns, which are supposedly valid across time and space, yet fail to address particular actors and cases. According to Benjamin Most and Harvey Starr “general” and “universal” models, which only operate under certain explicitly prescribed conditions, do not suffice to generate a systemic understanding of foreign policy decisions and international phenomenon. The pre-theoretical framework of “opportunity and willingness,” which Most and Starr develop, produces a general model to analyze world affairs in a consistent way. This framework does not highlight any concrete factor such as power preponderance, regime type, and composition of elite or polarity as a condition for an international phenomenon. Instead, “opportunity and willingness” is more interested in what these factors represent and how these factors shape state behaviors. In other words, the “opportunity and willingness” framework suggests a model that still enables generalizations but also has power to explain particular cases.
Topic:
International Relations, War, and Conflict
Political Geography:
Global Focus

20. Land Grab Processes in Romania and Bulgaria: A Historical Continuity Perspective

Author:
Nazif Mandaci
Publication Date:
06-2018
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Uluslararasi Iliskiler
Institution:
International Relations Council of Turkey (UİK-IRCT)
Abstract:
Although they are positioned in the periphery of the Western economic core, Romania and Bulgaria are different from the Third World countries that were exploited and colonized by the Western powers in the preceding centuries, where currently land grab processes are at work. However, it is observed that because of their geographical and political standings those countries are also influenced by the ongoing global land grab processes, albeit in different ways. The externalities of processes of enclosure, primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession as defined in general by the critical literature have continued to inflict particularly small landholders, as did in other societies in different parts of the world. However, upon their accession to the European Union, land grab processes in those countries entered into a new historical phase discerned by incoming new actors such as equity funds, and the unique dynamics such as the transformation of land into a speculative asset and an energy source.
Topic:
International Relations, History, European Union, Land, and Enclosure
Political Geography:
Europe, Bulgaria, and Romania