State behavior of an efficacious actor in the time of global power transition: A case study of Turkey in the post-cold war era

This doctoral thesis examines the role of middle powers in academic literature as a departure point to analyze Turkey's case study in the post-Cold War Era. According to a vast amount of data and research, the analysis demonstrates that Turkey's categorization as a middle power does not do justice to the kind of transformation and image construction of the Turkish state since the end of the Cold War. The changes unfolding across the region and the international system in the aftermath of the Cold War have impacted the geopolitical landscape around Turkey leading to the development for it to become a catalyzer for the evolutionary change Turkey's image has undergone since the 1990s up to 2020 as analyzed under three periods. This change, hence, transformation is examined in this thesis through Turkish Foreign Policy (TFP) as a means to explain the shift in identity and how the image construction has been an integral part of domestic political revision that continue to translate into the international vis a vis the interaction between the state actor, the state and the system as part of the Waltzian analysis. In this framework, international organizations serve as an opportunity space in which this interaction is made possible where Turkey is analyzed in its attempt to match discourse and material capabilities of the state to put pressure on the existing structure of the international system to reform. This is to say that in order to move towards a just and equity-based international system it must be inclusive and benefit many instead of the few where there can be equal reprsentation within the economic and security pie of the global community across international institutions. Therefore, this doctoral thesis offers a fresh insight to explain that Turkey no longer fits into the classification of middle powermanship requiring a new kind of power identification as the efficacious actor. The reason that calls for a new conceptualization is due to Cold War conditions' insufficiency to explain Turkey's new position in international politics. As such, this calls for new parameters to be explored under this particular new conceptualization. The thesis argues for a new type of conceptualization to describe Turkey's efforts to reform the world by presenting a moral and humanitarian approach. The discourse analysis provides a window of opportunity to examine Turkey's narrative of universal values couched within freedom, democracy and justice principles as part of the TFP agenda to offer its rare experience in the post-Cold War Era for other nation-states to adopt, emulate and contextualize within their own narratives in the struggle for democratization, emancipation and fair representation across international institutions. The nexus of International Relations theories, history, sociology and the overarching perspective on the deteriorating situation of the international "liberal world order" under the light of Wallerstein's world system analysis provides a global panorama of the many values and norms the international system lacks to realize as a result of conflicts, wars, ideological disagreements and injustices across humanity that this thesis aimed to discover. The outcome of this analysis is premised on the nature of the competing civilizational experiences aiming to shape the emerging multipolar world order in the post-Cold War era where the ideational coupled with material capabilities can be a source of power for actors like Turkey ventoring to re-write a geopolitical narrative for itself within its neighborhood and across the global community through the role of international organizations and platforms at large. Keywords: neorealism, neoliberalism, constructivism, efficacious, Muslim, moral, humanitarian, geowelfare