Full Text

Critical geopolitical approaches analyze how politics is imagined spatially and aim to reveal the politics behind the geography of global space. To this end, they make a distinction between three types of geopolitical reasoning. Formal geopolitics represents the geopolitical knowledge that is produced in strategic institutes, think tanks, and academia. Practical geopolitics refers to everyday forms of geopolitical reasoning that is utilized by political leaders and civil servants in explaining and legitimizing their foreign and security policies. Popular geopolitics is associated with the geopolitical narratives that are found in the mass media, cinema, novels, and cartoons. The first two categories are particularly important since most geopolitical reasoning takes place either in the formal or practical geopolitical spheres. Foreign policy decision-makers use practical geopolitical reasoning when they try to make spatial sense of the world, but they also frequently resort to formal forms of geopolitical knowledge to respond effectively to particular foreign policy questions. It is difficult to claim that critical geopolitics and especially its three types of geopolitical reasoning are reflected broadly enough in the academic discussions in Turkey. Although recently there has been a remarkable increase in the number of studies attempting to analyze the geopolitical discourses in Turkey by utilizing a critical approach, the field is still dominated by traditional ideas, which tend to associate geopolitics with realist concepts like national security, strategy, interest, and power.1 The prevalence of such a realist approach in geopolitical studies in Turkey is astonishing, when one considers that critical theories have become nearly as influential as traditional ones in other major fields of the international relations discipline in the Turkish academia. In order to initiate a similar trend in the sphere of geopolitics, there is a need to deconstruct or at least reinterpret some of the popular geopolitical themes and concepts that are frequently used by Turkish scholars and policymakers. Ahmet Davutoğlu, who has been Turkey’s foreign minister since 2009, is a particularly important figure in terms of critically analyzing the forms of geopolitical reasoning in Turkey. This is because his ideas represent both formal and practical geopolitics due to his dual identities as a professor of international relations and a minister of foreign affairs. In the formal geopolitical sense, his seminal book Strategic Depth: The International Position of Turkey (2001) is still regarded as one of the most influential sources for scholars of post-Cold War Turkish foreign policy. In the practical geopolitical sense, even before his appointment as a foreign minister, he served as the chief foreign policy advisor to the Turkish governments under the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). His statements and writings, in this regard, provide very important indicators about the evolution of geopolitics in Turkey in the past decade. Employing a critical geopolitical approach, this paper aims to explore the formal and practical implications of Davutoğlu’s ideas toward the Middle East. To this end, his writings and speeches will be critically analyzed and the images and narratives that shape his geopolitical understanding of this region will be identified.