Publication

A certain shift in the Turkish foreign policy has been noticeable over the last decade, especially after the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002, which manifested in closer relations with its Arab neighbors and simultaneously a more aggressive stance towards Israel. These developments have led many researchers to say that Turkey’s activism in the Middle East represents its return towards the East, at the expense of its Europeanization aspirations. This research paper aims to study the validity of this claim by looking at different sets of interactions between Turkey and its neighbors, through a constructivist lens of competing yet complementary variables.