Introduction: Why Critical Approaches in Foreign Policy Analysis?

This volume titled Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy has both theoretical and empirical ambitions. First, by bringing together different authors and their research, the volume asks overall whether we can study foreign policy-making in a meaningful academic way by using critical constructivist, discursive, post-colonial, post-structuralist, and gender approaches. Secondly, each chapter analyses certain actors and events by developing an empirically informed research agenda. With these efforts, the volume investigates what foreign policy means and addresses particular cases while asking how we can broaden such a critical research agenda to study foreign policy in general. The authors agree that we can study actors by looking into their internal and external worlds, which condition them and are also conditioned by them. The authors in this volume assume that actors are products of their complex environments. Chapters accordingly shed light on the social-cultural—political-economic context, power relations, boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, by inspecting identity constructions and political articulations. In chapters, discourses on new and old geographies, borders, emerging security and insecurities (usually insecurities), and the confirming or contesting of orders embedded in power relations and exterior structures are investigated in acritical manner. Methodologically, this volume asks important empirical questions, such as what tools are available for researchers to understand the complex social realities and identities of actors and how we can utilise them in meaningful ways. In this process, the authors investigate several creative ways to make more sense of their research topics and subjects. Particularly in studying a subject that has not always been stable and that has multiple identities and belongings, the authors employ diverse methods while maintaining a spirit of continuous curiosity and academic exploration.