Understanding Turkish foreign affairs in the 21st century : a homegrown theorizing attempt

Ankara : The Department of International Relations, İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, 2014.Thesis (Ph. D.) -- Bilkent University, 2014.Includes bibliographical references leaves 306-330.For Turkish scholars, understanding especially the last decade of Turkey’s international politics has been a great challenge. Answering fundamental questions, -and many others-, requires collection of reliable, complete and uniform data and interpreting them on conceptual terms. The purpose of this thesis is to understand and explain Turkey’s foreignl affairs in a holistic way and offer a homegrown model based on original data. Building an original event dataset, this thesis accounts for the empirical observations made out of Turkey’s international practice and conceptualizes it as a complex system. It accounts for foreign policy change in complex systems, introduces concepts such as domestic responsivity, domestic, international nodes as well as intermestic and international nexus, and puts forward a helical model of power accumulation, as an outcome of successful foreign policy change.Biltekin, GoncaPh.D

Non-material sources of Turkish Armed Forces' political power : a "military in society" approach

Ankara : The Department of International Relations, The Institute of Economics and Social Sciences of Bilkent University, 2007.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2007.Includes bibliographical references leaves 156-159.This thesis is an attempt to understand the non-material sources of Turkish Armed Forces’ political power. For that purpose, the thesis looks at theories of power and relevant civil-military relations literature and illustrates that the current civil-military relations literature employs an institution-based formal decisionmaking approach to military’s political power, where non-material sources of armed forces political power is mostly overlooked. Moreover, current literature presumes the existence of a conflictual relationship between the military and the society where interests of the society and the military clash. Therefore, there is a theoretical gap which makes it problematic to study armies like Turkish Armed Forces, which enjoy a long-term and considerable support from their societies. In order to provide for an answer to such a gap, the thesis develops a “military in society” approach and establishes that the political power of the Turkish Armed Forces emanates from its distinctive relationship with its society which has historical, cultural, social and discursive dimensions.Biltekin, GoncaM.S

Replication Data for Time to Quantify Turkey’s Foreign Affairs: Setting Quality Standards for a Maturing International Relations Discipline

The first part of this article discusses the current state of International Relations (IR) in Turkey, and begins with the argument that the local disciplinary community shows limited scholarly engagement. The article proposes that the growth of such engagement could be encouraged by increased methodological diversity, in particular additional research using quantitative methods. It argues that quantitative research could contribute to engagement by providing conceptual and methodological clarity around which scholarly debates could develop and ultimately contribute to Turkish IR’s progress as a disciplinary community. To substantiate these claims, the article goes on to discuss the development and contributions of quantitative research to global IR, and illustrates the potential benefits of using quantitative methods in the study of Turkish foreign affairs