Turkey’s relations with Egypt abruptly hit rock bottom following the Egyptian army’s ousting of Mohammed Morsi in July 2013. Despite significant political fluctuations between the two countries, there is a gap in academic literature about addressing alterations in Turkish–Egyptian relations holistically. To this end, this article proposes that Turkey’s volatile relationship with the Egyptian governments since the so-called Arab Spring is partially a reflection of broader institutional changes in Turkey’s domestic settings. One of these salient changes is the discursive transformation of Turkish national self-perception. This article shows how Turkey’s new governmental self-understanding of “majoritarianism” manifests in its relations with Egypt. It asserts that this transformation in the governmental perception of the national-self made Turkey’s policies on Egypt, which oscillate between one extreme to another, “conceivable/thinkable” via the medium of national identity discourses. It shows the interplay between the governmental identity discourses of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) elites and Turkey’s policies on Egypt in the institutional/non-discursive foreign policy field.

This article seeks to expand the discussion on Methodological Nationalism (MN) within the discipline of International Relations (IR), to contribute to MN literature from the perspective of IR studies and to evaluate the prevalence of MN in the field by the quantification of selected works. To achieve these goals, the article, firstly, recapitulates the general MN literature and critically evaluates this discussion in IR. Later, it identifies the forms of MN as they appear in IR with two faces: Level of analysis (nation-as-arena) and unit of analysis (nation-as-actor). Secondly, the article proposes a method to assess the prevalence of MN through quantification. Finally, the article applies its method to IR works to address the question of how widespread MN is in academia in Turkey. The findings demonstrate the proportional pervasiveness of MN within the IR community of Turkey, which is part of the "periphery" in the discipline. The findings also let us draw some hypothetical conclusions, which have the potential to be a springboard for further research on the MN-IR nexus.

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The Turkish Armed Forces successfully executed two consecutive cross-border operations (Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch) in Syria following the failed coup d‘état in 2016. Turkey‘s supposedly traditional ―Kurdophobic‖ reflexes were widely deemed as the motivation behind these operations. However, these assertions are weak when it comes to Turkey‘s relatively harmonious relations with Iraqi Kurdistan and the significant portion of Turkish Kurds‘ endorsement of the incumbent Turkish government. Moreover, the fact that the Turkish government was not a hardliner against the Kurdish-led outlawed Democratic Union Party and its military wing People's Protection Units in the early days of the Syrian Civil War undermines these essentialist and reductionist contentions. This article proposes a geopolitics-driven and more holistic explanation to the Turkish military campaign into Northern Syria. Its objective is to provide a more comprehensive insight into Turkish geopolitical manoeuvres in Syria, to set the contextual and ideational background of the military operations and to present Turkey‘s cognitive horizon for its actions within its vicinity. The article anchors its theoretical basis in the ―critical geopolitics‖ approach in order to place the Turkish intervention into a broader geopolitical context.

Following Turkey's recent military operation in Syria (Operation Peace Spring), "Turks" and "Kurds" have widely been dichotomized by the Western media outlets and political circles. US President Donald Trump even claimed that "Turks" and "Kurds" have been fighting for hundreds of years, and that they are "natural enemies." However, the complex historical relationship of "Turks" and "Kurds," as a loosely connected social totality prior to the age of nationalism, refutes such sloppy and feeble contentions. This work presents an identity-driven historical survey of Turkish/Turkmen societies' and polities' interrelations with Kurdish collectivities until the emergence of modern nationhood and nationalism. In doing so, this article provides an ideational and narrational context feeding the Turkish government's contemporary relationship with the Kurds of the Middle East. The major complication in journalistic and academic literature is rooted in the lack or omission of historical background informing current policy choices influenced by how relevant actors historically perceive each other. Today's incidents and facts such as the "solution process," "village guard system" or different Kurdish collectivities' positions between Iran and Turkey are sometimes akin to precedent events in history. This work aims to make a holistic contribution to fill this gap and to provide a succinct historical overview of interrelations.