Post-Cold War Turkish Foreign Policy in The Middle East: new challenges and missed opportunities

The main aim of this dissertation is to analyse the evolution of Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East from the 1990s to the present. In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a globalizing world led Turkey towards a strong sense of insecurity and Turkish domestic politics was also characterized by weakness and instability. These uncertainties were translated into a foreign policy that could not project the country towards the Middle East and responding to the challenges coming from region going beyond the concerns of its own national security. In the 2000s, the approach began to change. Turkey’s new political scenario was more stable than in the previous decade and thus the country inaugurated a more confident and active Middle Eastern foreign policy. However, with the end of the first decade of the new millennium, Turkey had to face a new and unpredictable challenge: that of the Arab Spring. In this work, I focus on the nature and the reasons causing this shift in Turkey’s foreign policy toward the Middle East and I argue that these changes derived both from internal and external developments. The dissertation analyses critically the foreign policy put forward by the AKP in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, particularly its lack of projectuality in responding to the emerging post-Arab spring scenario in the Middle East. This work elaborates on the question of whether Turkey lost the possibility of playing stabilizing role in the region, being unable of taking distance from the internal conflicts within the countries involved in the Arab revolts