Mehmet Özkan

The Turkish Maarif Foundation (TMF) is the most recent state-led institution to promote Turkey’s cultural diplomacy and soft power. This commentary contextualizes the Turkish Maarif Foundation in Turkish foreign and domestic policy and outlines a vision through evaluating its activities over the past three years.

Religion has always been an overriding theme among social scientists, politicians, diplomats and laymen. While the importance attached to it has changed over the course of time; its significance has never ceased for society and states. Although the paradigm of secularism or secularization has been prominent and prevalent in the social sciences, religion has recently gained strong momentum in western academia.

Turkey’s foreign policy in Africa has achieved more than what initially has been planned as Opening to Africa in the last decade. A new post-2014 vision for Africa is necessity for variety of reasons including the tiredness among some segments of society and some state institutions. This article outlines the challenges fort his vision and put forward some ideas for the future of Turkey-Africa relations. The underlying point is that time has come for partnership with other actor in Africa to deepen further the relations.

The effectiveness of the Muslim world in finding a solution to the Darfur conflict is open to debate. While many Muslim countries denied the existence of a genocidal conflict, arguing that the reports were a Western plot, some tried to go beyond the dichotomy of the West’s insistence on genocide and its outright rejection by the Muslim world. This article discusses Turkey’s Darfur policy in terms of ‘the war on terror’ discourse and Turkey’s developing multidimensional foreign policy and the restrictions arising from such a policy. It argues that Turkey’s approach has had the characteristics of both a convergence with and differentiation from that of the Muslim world. Turkey intended to go beyond current debates by creating a new ‘language’ on Darfur but failed due to its ineffective media policy and the limitations of its multidimensional foreign policy. Nevertheless, Turkey’s involvement may be seen as an example of passive quiet diplomacy in a highly complex international environment.

Based on extensive literature and fieldwork research in international relations, intellectual history and political thought, Cemil Aydin has written an exceptionally detailed account of the boundaries and horizons of pan-Islamic and pan-Asian thoughts on world order.