This article aims to examine the meaning of the historical concept of the National Pact (Misak-& imath; Milli) in Turkish foreign policy. It argues that although the National Pact is now more than a hundred years old, it has still been widely used and referred to in both domestic and foreign policy. In this regard, it suggests that it has usually formed a legitimizing background for Turkey's foreign policy stance especially in relation to its boundaries. However, the article also shows that as the document was contentious from the start, with no clearly defined boundaries, it has transformed throughout the century based on the necessities of Turkish foreign policy. This study emphasizes that the politics of the National Pact reflect Turkey's cartographic anxiety, encompassing both territorial fear and ambition, sometimes experienced simultaneously. While constituting a historical narrative that demonstrates anxiety about borders in Turkish foreign policy, the National Pact also articulates a vision of Turkey's geo-body, implying that it draws a specific territorial shape as well as creates criteria for the body politic.
The Global IR literature of recent years has effectively brought greater attention to the need for transforming and globalizing the IR discipline, but there is little evidence that fundamental change has yet occurred. This work highlights this disconnect between Global IR's aims and practice, and argues that to move beyond the rhetorical, greater emphasis should be placed on pedagogical change. The work draws on a collaborative project between a professor and four MA students, and reports the results of weekly discussions in which they explored their experiences of the challenges faced by those entering the disciplinary community, and proposed pedagogical solutions for contributing to a globalizing of IR. The findings raise warning flags of a growing 'academic industrial complex,' in which students are herded into a competitive race driving them to publish at ever earlier stages. By emphasizing product over curiosity, our 'factories' of future IR scholars (graduate classrooms), are leading to premature assimilation, homogenization of thought, and, ultimately, to a "global" IR discipline that remains trapped in narrow Western-centric knowledge production.
The Syrian civil war provides a novel contemporary case for examining how different status-seeking powers engage in military interventions simultaneously. This study evaluates the actions of Russia, Iran, and T & uuml;rkiye in Syria to assess the extent to which their interventions serve to enhance their international status. Through a comparative analysis of primary and secondary sources, the research reveals the complex dynamics between status deficits and military conflicts. The findings indicate that while status gains through military intervention were evident for all three nations before the downfall of the Assad regime, only Russia explicitly pursued status enhancement. In contrast, for T & uuml;rkiye and Iran, any status acquired was largely a byproduct of their broader strategic goals and security concerns. After the regime's collapse, Russia and Iran struggled to retain their status, whereas T & uuml;rkiye managed to maintain, or even enhance, its standing. This empirical study also contributes to the status literature by demonstrating that not only major powers but also middle powers may resort to violence and gain international status. Furthermore, this research challenges state-centric views on status by showing that dissatisfied states may confront non-state actors to elevate their status without engaging in traditional interstate warfare.
This article utilizes data from the 2022-2023 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) survey, which features a sample of 176 scholars in Turkey and 979 in the US, to explore how IR scholars in both countries conceptualize their disciplinary identity, select research methods, engage with policy, and navigate academic recognition. Framed by how scholars in semiperipheral contexts relate to disciplinary cores, the study investigates whether Turkish IR reveals convergence with or divergence from global disciplinary norms. The findings highlight enduring divides: Turkish scholars demonstrate a stronger preference for qualitative, applied, and regionally focused research, whereas their American counterparts operate in a more pluralistic and post-paradigmatic scholarly environment. Nevertheless, there are signs of convergence, particularly in the increased engagement of Turkish scholars with international publications and leading theoretical approaches. This hybrid positioning highlights the fundamental contradictions within the Global IR agenda, namely the tension between inclusion and hierarchy, and between adaptation and autonomy. The article contributes to existing literature by offering a comparative, data-driven analysis of how disciplinary divisions and partial convergences influence knowledge production in different geopolitical contexts.
This paper explains how the geo-culturally motivated postcolonial views on global governance produce an essentially dichotomous notion of the nonWestern agency defined in terms of "silence versus defiance": habitually, the agency of the non-West is reduced to either "silence" (under hegemony) or "defiance" (under counter-hegemony) often postured in an opposition to the West. This phenomenon is embodied in the mainstream readings of global governance that reduce India's agency to its spectacular gestures of defiance within the institutional structures of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), the G77, and BRICS. By contrast, this paper evokes an instance of a complex trajectory of "polymorphous non-Western agency," i.e., the agency of a subnational political-epistemic community in the Indian region of Kerala that framed a highly influential basic needs approach to global governance in the ]960s-70s. This paper spells out how this still-relevant "basic needs approach" to global governance moves beyond the postcolonial geo-cultural essentialism and reveals a "West-non-West relational agency," thereby bridging the cognitive gaps between the West and the non-West and serving as a prototype for expanding the horizons of the Global IR research programme.
