Samuele C.A. Abrami is a PhD candidate at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (UCSC) in Milan, where he is also a subject expert and lecturer in the master’s in Middle Eastern Studies program. He is a research assistant at the International Center for Contemporary Turkish Studies and Ce.St.In.Geo. Samuele has been a visiting fellow for two years at Sabancı University in Istanbul, conducting field research for his project on Turkish foreign policy. He also works on Turkey’s domestic politics, relations with the EU and the wider Mediterranean, and broader issues concerning European and MENA security dynamics. Samuele is part of the Turkey-Europe Future Forum, the Consortium for European Symposia on Turkey, and the German-Italian Spinelli Forum. Supported by a CM-Lerici grant, he was a visiting researcher at the Stockholm Institute for Turkish Studies in 2024.

A New Way for Strategic Partnerships? Italy-Turkey Relations and the EU’s Security Architecture

Amid the ongoing polycrisis, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted the EU to redesign its security architecture. Yet, this entails two main challenges: enhancing member states’ contributions to a Common Foreign and Security Policy amid global multipolarity and defining external strategic partnerships in line with the EU’s interests. In particular, this project tackles the impact of the EU’s geopolitical turn on a key partner like Turkey. On the one hand, it critically engages with the problems related to Ankara’s domestic alterations and its parallel quest for strategic autonomy that contributed to shaping conflictual or transactional relations with the EU. On the other hand, it analytically considers how Turkey’s peculiar status as a formal candidate leaves room for potential forms of cooperation. To explore these dynamics, this project studies the case of Turkey’s relations with Italy, a crucial EU member state that, recognizing the former’s strategic value, has managed to compartmentalize specific issues and maintain a constructive dialogue. Thus, it seeks to answer two questions: 1) Is momentum building toward a new European security architecture that generates novel models to integrate Turkey? 2) Could Italy’s privileged partnership with Turkey pave the way for a reconceptualization of strategic partnerships at the EU level? Based on qualitative methods, this project will combine research from primary and secondary sources with semi-structured interviews.