The Ambivalence of Turkish Soft Power in Southeast Europe

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk
Additional contact information
Ahmet Erdi Öztürk: London Metropolitan University,London,United Kingdom

Border Crossing, 2020, vol. 10, issue 2, 111-128

Abstract: With the instrumentalisation of Islam via the state apparatuses in foreign policy, Sunni Islam has become both an instrument and a purpose of the repressive Justice and Development Party and Turkey has started to be one of the front runners of countries who are increasingly competing for using Islam as a foreign policy tool. This relatively new role of Turkey has created various diverging ideas among the host countries where Turkey is active. While some countries are rather content with Turkey’s religiously fueled policies and humanitarian aid, and define Turkey as one of the most influential actors which can use religion as a soft power tool, others refuse to define Turkey’s policies within the boundaries of religious soft power due to its extra-territorial authoritarian practices and instrumentalisation of religion for these. Under these circumstances, this study defines Turkey’s religious soft power as an ambivalent one and scrutinises the reasons behind this ambiguity via exploring some country cases from Southeast Europe.

Keywords: Soft Power; Turkey; Balkans; Islam; Power; religion; foreign policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.tplondon.com/bc/article/view/1050/787 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mig:bcwpap:v:10:y:2020:i:2:p:111-128

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://bordercrossi ... ormation/librarians/

DOI: 10.33182/bc.v10i2.1050

Access Statistics for this article

Border Crossing is currently edited by Prof Ibrahim Sirkeci and Dr. Dilara Seker

More articles in Border Crossing from Transnational Press London, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by TPLondon ().