Energy as a Factor for Turkish - Russian Rapprochement

This dissertation started with a simple question: What was the main source of Turkish-Russian rapprochement seen generally after the end of the Cold War, specifically within the last 15 years (2001-2015)? A review of the literature on the subject revealed three explanations for Turkish-Russian rapprochement: (1) Perception of the U.S. as a threat in the Black Sea and Caucasus region, (2) Deterioration of Turkey’s relations with the West, and (3) Turkey’s need for energy. Thus came the main question for this work: To what extent does Turkey’s need for energy play a role in Turkish-Russian rapprochement? Although each of the explanations are analyzed in detail as variables in this study, the focus is on energy, primarily from a Turkish foreign policy perspective. Once the variables were explored with their respective influence in Turkish-Russian relations, they were further tested on the foreign policy choices of Turkey in two specific regions of interest for Turkey: the Middle East and the South Caucasus. In the case studies, with the consideration that each country’s specific conditions played a role in its relations with Turkey, energy was found to be a significant factor. The findings from the case studies further supported the role of energy beyond any other factor in the making of Turkish foreign policy, and thus also support the main argument that Turkey’s need for energy has served as the main factor for Turkish-Russian rapprochement

COVID-19 and Biocybersecurity\u27s Increasing Role on Defending Forward

The evolving nature of warfare has been changing with cybersecurity and the use of advanced biotechnology in each aspect of the society is expanding and overlapping with the cyberworld. This intersection, which has been described as “biocybersecurity” (BCS), can become a major front of the 21st-century conflicts. There are three lines of BCS which make it a critical component of overall cybersecurity: (1) cyber operations within the area of BCS have life threatening consequences to a greater extent than other cyber operations, (2) the breach in health-related personal data is a significant tool for fatal attacks, and (3) health-related misinformation campaigns as a component of BCS can cause significant damage compared to other misinformation campaigns. Based on the observation that rather than initiating the necessary cooperation COVID-19 helped exacerbate the existing conflicts, the authors suggest that BCS needs to be considered as an essential component of the cyber doctrine, within the Defending Forward framework. The findings are expected to help future cyber policy developments

S-400s, Disinformation, and Anti-American Sentiment in Turkey

As social and political discourse in most countries becomes more polarized, anti-Americanism has risen not only in the Middle East and Latin America but also among the U.S. allies in Europe. Social media is one platform used to disseminate anti-American views in NATO countries, and its effectiveness can be magnified when mass media, public officials, and popular figures adopt these views. Disinformation, in particular, has gained recognition as a cybersecurity issue from 2016 onward, but disinformation can be manufactured domestically in addition to being part of a foreign influence campaign. In this paper, we analyze Turkish tweets using sentiment analysis techniques and compare the model\u27s results to the manual investigation based on qualitative research. We investigate institutional conditions, social and mass media control, and the state of political discourse in Turkey and focus on narratives pertaining to the purchase of S-400 missiles from Russia by Turkey, as well as the actors spreading these narratives, analyzing for popularity, narrative type, and bot-like behavior. Our findings suggest that although anti-American sentiment has held relatively steady in Turkey since 2003, the tightening of control over mass media networks in Turkey and the adoption of conspiratorial rhetoric by President Erdogan and his allies in the AKP from 2014 onward amplified anti-American sentiment and exacerbated negative sentiment on social media by pitting users against one another. This study and its findings are important because they highlight the importance of social and psychological components of cybersecurity. The ease by which disinformation efforts, influence operations, and other “softer” forms of cyber- and information warfare can be carried out means that they will only grow more common

Comparison of performance measures in the virtual environment and real world land navigation tasks

Spatial knowledge acquisition is an integral part of navigation related studies. With the improvement of technology, the researchers gained the capability of testing the spatial ability in a virtual world as well. However, little research has been conducted to understand whether VE performance can predict Real World performance or not and amongst the measures used what measures are most predictive. This thesis research addresses the validity of performance measures used in virtual and real environments. Ten subjects have participated in two experiments. The first experiment was a navigation task in a building type virtual environment. With some modifications, Herman Hall model was used for this experiment. The second experiment was a navigation task in a real building. For this experiment Middle East school in DLI was used. Measures of landmark, survey and route knowledge were taken for each participant. The results did not suggest a correlation in overall performance measures. However a correlation is observed in the performance for the landmark knowledge. The acquisition of survey knowledge by time is also seen in the results of the studyhttp://www.archive.org/details/comparisonofperf00karaTurkish Army author