CIAO DATE: 11/2014
A publication of:
SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research
This paper presents the Foreign Policy Circumplex (FPC) coding framework and the (FPC-TR) to identify aspects of Turkish foreign policy behavior between 2002 and 2011. The findings show an increase in cooperative foreign policy behavior and relational third party engagements in the second term of the AK Party administration. Turkey increased its third-party role in the context of crises with Iran and Syria. In relations with Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestinian and Russia/Georgia conflicts, the same role, albeit with a decreasing tendency, continued. There were a number of decreased interactions related to issues, such as EU-Cyprus, Cyprus, Greece, Iraq, and Israel-Palestine. That said, we see an increase in relations with North Africa, the Balkan countries, Syria, the Middle East, Armenia and Israel. There is also greater cooperation in the context of Turkey's high priority bilateral relations, such as with the US, the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Russia, as well as with the UN and European Council. With the EU and Israel, however, a reverse trend is observed.
Datasets of the behavior of international and intrastate actors reflect a rich tradition. Following the behavioral revolution in political science, scholars interested in capturing patterns of war and armed conflict introduced seminal datasets, e.g., Correlates of War (COW), Uppsala Conflict Data Program UCDP /PRIO and Minorities at Risk (MAR). Event data is another established tool in studying political behavior patterns of international actors. Event data relies primarily on news sources to capture cooperative and competitive actions between and within states. It contains information about dyadic interactions of international actors over a particular time period and consists of coding categories and subcategories. Common in all conflict event datasets is conflict-cooperation as a standard analytical continuum.
These schemas are constructed to depict foreign policy behaviors of the international actors when they are generally direct stakeholders to conflicts. An exception to this observation is "Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO)," an event dataset generated to identify third-party mediation in international conflicts.
The CAMEO framework follows the neutral-cooperation-conflict pattern and allows the observation of gradual moves from neutrality to cooperation. It also contains specific subcategories formulated to detect mediation activities e.g., appealing to engage in or accept mediation (028), expressing intent to mediate (039), and mediating (045). That said, the 20 main categories of CAMEO are not organized to differentiate between the two distinct roles, i.e. when the actor is a direct stakeholder in the encounter and when the actor acts as a third-party intervener in other actor's conflicts. Therefore, in the absence of such analytical refinement, categories (and their sub-categories) such as, "make public statement (1)," "appeal (02)," "express intent to cooperate (3)," "disapprove (11)," "threaten (13)," "exhibit force posture (15)," and "use conventional force (19)" are, unless specified in the subcategories, evaluated in the context of a dyadic relation between the source and the target; that is, when the source is a direct stakeholder in the encounter. The same categories, however, have the potential to describe actions of the source as a third-party intervener in its roles as facilitator, muscle mediator, peacekeeper, peace enforcer, invader, etc. Such fine-tuning is not possible with the abovementioned categories. However, some other categories, such as consult (04), are designed to consist of sub-categories that address both party and partisan roles.
In addition to CAMEO, there is an increase in the number of datasets specifically constructed on the role of mediators in interstate and intra-state wars, including: the Civil Wars Mediation (CWM) dataset, International Conflict Management and International Crisis Behaviour (ICB) among others. These datasets are particularly designed to conduct explanatory studies to measure the impact of the third-party intervener on the success of conflict termination. These efforts do not treat third-party intervention roles in the context of the overall foreign policy behavior of international actors.
Recent contributions in the development of even datasets revolve around technical challenges of automated coding and the development of machine-assisted systems. What is missing in this debate, however, is the use of datasets in addressing other important issue areas of international studies, such as debates on bridging the theory-policy gap, foreign policy roles, international interventions, foreign policy restructuring
and middle power/major foreign policy behavior. The current research contributes to the existing knowledge through its extended analytic focus and research goals. More specifically, the FPC is a theory-driven framework. Unlike other data sets, its coding categories have not been generated on an ad hoc basis, but rather are induced from the operational capabilities of different sub-fields of international relations. Therefore, the model provides the means through which the researcher can address important issue areas and explore connections between theory and practice. Similarly, the model enables the analyst to differentiate third-party behaviors and identify their roles in disputes, and makes possible further qualifications on the nature of outside interventions and forms of competitive engagements.
The next section offers a brief overview of Turkish foreign policy practices, lays out the basic features of the FPC-TR dataset, and introduces the codebook of the dataset and data collection procedures.