Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in the Turkish and Qatari Foreign Policy on the Arab Spring

Senior Scholar and Conflict Resolution and Mediation Stream Coordinator Bülent Aras and Özgür Pala’s article "Practical Geopolitical Reasoning in the Turkish and Qatari Foreign Policy on the Arab Spring" was published in Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies on July 17, 2015.

As a regional power, Turkey aspires to become an influential international actor. As a small state, Qatar seeks to enhance its security and sovereignty and become an indispensable regional middle power. The Arab Spring protests have created an ideal context for both actors to realize their geopolitical goals. However, adverse political developments have turned most Arab Spring countries into battlegrounds wherein old geopolitical rivalries deepened and new regional alliances were constructed. Taking Gaza, Syria and Egypt as cases in point, this paper investigates how Ankara and Doha's evolving practical geopolitical reasoning and its domestic and international representations converged to create venues for cooperation and promotion of relations to a level of political alignment.