Pavel V. Shlykov

The paper analyses the dynamics of civic activity and development of social protest culture in Turkey since the establishment of Republic in 1923. The study explores the main vectors, forms and normative strategies of social protest within different periods of Turkey’s modern history. Basing on the analysis of publications in the Turkish press (from the late 1920s up to the 2010s) the author argues new typology of mass political actions and protest unrest in Turkey and paradigms of interference between social protest and political culture.

The paper analyses Turkey’s foreign policy towards the Middle East in the 2000s and early 2010s in two interrelated aspects: as a complicated search for a mutually acceptable model of cooperation between Turkey and the West on international security, and as a problem of differences in their perspectives on international security and approaches to its implementation in Turkey, the EU and the US. The relatively successful period of cooperation in the global war on terrorism in the 2000s did not help Turkey and the West overcome these conceptual differences. First, this prevented the full integration of Turkey into the Western system of international security in the Middle East. Second, it deepened differences in perspectives on international security and the struggle against those accused of terrorism and radicalism by the West. The Arab Spring and the escalation of instability in the region since the early 2010s, related to new civil wars and the rise of the Islamic State, highlighted this divergence and accelerated Ankara’s ambitions to act as an independent regional power in the Middle East, with its own agenda and strategy for relations with both state and non-state actors.