Türkiye has emerged as an unconventional Indo-Pacific actor. This article explains why and how Türkiye has become visible in a region far from its primary strategic theatres, and why this matters for debates on international hierarchy and middle-power agency. Drawing on a neoclassical realist framework and qualitative evidence across five dimensions (trade, political-normative activity, security engagement, external pressures, and regional posture), the article shows that Türkiye’s Indo-Pacific actorness stems from permissive systemic conditions filtered through enduring domestic intervening variables, especially its national role conception as an Afro-Eurasian ‘centre country’. Türkiye’s engagement remains selective and bounded, yet sufficiently consequential to warrant analytical attention. More broadly, the case demonstrates how unconventional actors lacking geographic embeddedness and material centrality can nonetheless shape Indo-Pacific dynamics through calibrated engagement and specialised capabilities.
As an alliance without a formal Indo-Pacific mandate, NATO's engagement in this region prompts questions about its strategic orientation. This article assesses NATO as an unconventional actor along three dimensions: a broadened threat calculus (China as a systemic challenge), functional expansion into non-traditional domains (cyber, information resilience, defence-industrial coordination), and strategic alignment with the IP4 (Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand). Using the Forum's five variables - trade, political-normative interests, security, external pressures, and posture - the article shows that NATO's posture is modular, partnership-driven, and politically calibrated. Empirically, it finds that the Alliance operates as an external platform for coordination - delivering technical cooperation on cyber and supply-chain resilience and promoting interoperability - while avoiding treaty commitments or forward deployments. The analysis concludes that NATO's institutional capacities reshape trans-regional security practices but remain bounded by legal limits, member divergence, and partner sensitivities.
The Indo-Pacific is swiftly becoming the world’s geopolitical and geoeconomic epicentre. While the scholarly literature has focused on the regional interactions of traditional and emerging powers, very little attention has been devoted to “Unconventional Indo-Pacific Actors,” whether institutionally atypical, geographically peripheral, or functionally distinct. To address this noticeable gap in the scholarship, this article introduces the first Forum on this topic. It first contextualises the Indo-Pacific’s significance, prior to outlining the Forum’s notion of unconventionality and its theoretical and analytical frameworks. The latter comprises: (i) trade; (ii) political-normative interests; (iii) security interests; (iv) external pressures; and (v) regional posture and trends. Next, it presents its case studies: Ethiopia, NATO, South Africa, and Turkey. Lastly, it highlights the goals, means, and limitations in their Indo-Pacific engagement. Consequently, both this article and the Forum contribute to the IR literature by casting light on this topical and underexplored development.
This article uses Ethiopia’s Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Somaliland as a case study to examine how a landlocked African state can develop maritime aspirations, challenging prevailing assumptions about who counts as an Indo-Pacific player. Subjecting the case study to the assumptions of neoclassical realism and neoliberal institutionalism, we contend that internal legitimacy pressures and ethnic fragmentation intersect with institutional constraints and opportunities generated by global partners. Using the Forum’s five-parameter analytical framework (trade ties; political-normative interests; security interests; external pressures; current posture/trends), we demonstrate that Ethiopia’s pursuit of sea access leveraging geocultural memory is both innovative and destabilising: it connects Nile politics with Red Sea corridors, externalises domestic fragility into regional arenas and draws extra-regional rivalries into the Horn of Africa. This clarifies the conditions under which a landlocked state can act as an unconventional Indo-Pacific actor, and the consequences this poses to regional order and institutional norms.
When Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers agreed on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), many believed that the nuclear deal could be concluded mainly due to U.S. President Barack Obama’s determination and persistent overtures towards Tehran. However, such a point of view overlooks the fact that Obama’s approach towards Iran was not always conciliatory. This article begins with the assumption that Obama’s stance on Iran changed due to the array of challenges and opportunities posed by the Middle East. Employing operational code analysis, this study finds that Obama’s foreign policy learning towards Iran was intrinsically related to changes in his view of the deteriorating situation in the Middle East rather than Iran’s evolving domestic political environment. It therefore argues that the Iran nuclear deal was pursued as a strategy to prevent further destabilization of the Middle East, without a fundamental change in Obama’s perception of Iran.
