Understanding the Place of the Global South Within Turkey’s View of World Order

Abstract

Both in the conventional accounts of International Relations discipline, as well as in foreign policies of various actors, the Global South has predominantly been defined with reference to a “zone of lack” which is “in need of aid and tutelage.” In recent decades, postcolonial IR approaches have problematized this representation through interrogating the reasons for and processes of its construction. While doing this, however, the postcolonial IR literature mainly focuses on the Global North actors’ discourses and practices on the Global South, and how non-core actors view their counterparts remains underexamined. Based on this gap in the literature, this study investigates whether and how Turkey, as a non-core actor in world politics, challenges or contributes to predominant representations of the Global South. As such, the study seeks to answer the question of “how do the politicians in Turkey understand the place of the Global South in world politics?” The study is structured around three sections. The first section looks at previous works done about Turkish foreign policy in the Global South. The second section presents our theoretical framework, and the selected research method. The third section analyses the discourses produced in the 2000s by political elites from both the ruling as well as the opposition political parties in Turkey about the Global South. The study concludes with discussing the implications of our findings.