Turkey: a Regional Power Facing a Changing International System

Abstract

Turkey's foreign policy activism in recent decades, characterized by an ambitious regional agenda and visibility in global affairs, has generated a lively debate. This paper attempts to position Turkey in modern-day international relations, in order to develop an analytical framework capable of theorizing its regional and global-level activism coherently. It thus proposes to conceptualize Turkey as a regional power and argues that such actors' behavior can be analyzed with reference to three interrelated variables: the nature of regional order, their behavioral attitudes, and the interactions at the regional-global nexus.