Cataloged from PDF version of article.This article examines the discursive practices that enable the construction of Turkish “exceptionalism.” It\ud argues that in an attempt to play the mediator/peacemaker role as an emerging power, the Turkish elite\ud construct an “exceptionalist” identity that portrays Turkey in a liminal state. This liminality and thus the\ud “exceptionalist” identity it creates, is rooted in the hybridization of Turkey’s geographical and historical\ud characteristics. The Turkish foreign policy elite make every effort to underscore Turkey’s geography as\ud a meeting place of different continents. Historically, there has also been an ongoing campaign to depict\ud Turkey’s past as “multicultural” and multi-civilizational. These constructions of identity however, run\ud counter to the Kemalist nation-building project, which is based on “purity” in contrast to “hybridity”\ud both in terms of historiography and practice

During the Cold War, "buffer" or "bastion" seemed a popular metaphor to describe Turkey. After the Cold War, "bridge," (and, to some extent, the "crossroad") metaphor started to dominate the Turkish foreign policy discourse. This article traces the use of "bridge" metaphor in this discourse in the post-Cold War period by the Turkish foreign policy elite. It develops two arguments. First, the word bridge is a "metaphor of vision" combining Turkey's perceived geographical exceptionalism with an identity and a role at the international level. As a "metaphor of vision," the employment of the word "bridge" highlighted Turkey's liminality and justified some of its foreign policy actions to Eurasia and then to the Middle East. Second, because the bridge metaphor was used in different context to justify different foreign policy choices, its meaning has changed, illustrating that metaphors are not static constructs. It concludes by saying that the continuous use of "bridge" metaphor might reinforce Turkey's "liminality," placing Turkey in a less classifiable category than the regular "othering" practices. When the subject is Turkish politics, one frequently encounters books or articles that contain the words "Turkey," "between," "East" and "West" in their titles. 1 Even if the title does not contain any of these words, it is very likely that, be it an article, a book or a monograph, there will be a reference to how "important," "troubled," or for that matter, "difficult," Turkey's geography is. 2 Such titles are so abundant that sometimes rather than saying something new about Turkey's politics, they end up bolstering Turkish geographical "exceptionalism.

In the recent past, there have been countless instances of arms transfers to countries with problematic human rights records, many of which have been cited in the reports of various advocacy groups. However, so far, the amount of research classifying these flows has been limited. This study examines the trends between 1999 and 2003 in arms transfer to countries with poor human rights records, as well as the reasons for continuation of these transfers. It puts forward two major arguments for these transfers to such countries. First, the national and international codes ostensibly "prohibiting" transfers to these countries are crafted in a way that eventually plays into the hands of the countries and manufacturers that want to transfer. Second, the end of the Cold War has turned the arms transfer market into a buyer's market more than ever. The declining domestic military spending experienced in most of the seller countries has forced arms manufacturers to pursue markets beyond their borders, sometimes even illegally and illicitly.

This article assesses the role of educational exchange as a foreign policy tool. It investigates public and private educational ties that were established between Turkey and Turkic populations of Eurasia, including the Turkic republics of the former Soviet Union after 1991-a period which is considered to be the beginning of a new era in Turkish foreign policy making. After spending the Cold War as a buffer state, Turkey felt the need to redefine its role in the international arena in the aftermath of the Cold War. The emergence of the Turkic republics played an important role in this redefinition process. © 2004 University of Glasgow

This article discusses the Turkish movie Valley of the Wolves—Iraq (Kurtlar Vadisi—Irak), a blockbuster in Turkey in 2006. The movie has made an important mark on the history of Turkish popular culture, not through any artistic achievement, but because of the movie's 'reversed' representations/imaginations. The movie contains favorable views of 'Pax Turca' and 'Pax Islamica' as well as a critique, which is quite anti-American, of the American occupation of Iraq. These images and thus the movie itself give powerful insights into the geopolitical self/other representations of Turks in the current global (dis)order. In addition to these 'reversed' geopolitical representations, the movie reverses (or to be more correct, 'steals') and uses one of the most important soft power tools that Westerners have: cinema and, hence, makes Valley of the Wolves—Iraq a case of double 'anti-geopolitics'.