The fighting terrorist dimension of Turkish and American relations in the context of press releases

The research question, which forms the departure point for this thesis, is 'to what extent states can cooperate against violent nonstate actors and terrorism'. To this end, the policies and cooperation dynamics of the USA and Turkey against PKK/PYD and ISIS are studied. The method followed is the joint application of discourse analysis and process tracing. The process analysis was conducted by analyzing the discourses of people in the management of different institutions, from heads of state to the ministry of defense, from foreign ministers to government spokespersons between 2011-2018 and comparing them with their actions in the field. Various news sources were scanned in this time period, and the operations carried out against terrorist organizations in the field were examined in tandem with the literature review. Discourses of people in state institutions were obtained from publicly available sources and cross-checked by researching and confirming from various sources. The opinions and suggestions in the thesis do not reflect the opinion of any person or institution, and belong to the researcher.