Insight Turkey / issues

Editor's Note | Spring 2026

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:20:00 GMT

Taken together, the contributions in this issue reflect a shared conviction: that the decisions made at and around the 2026 Ankara Summit will shape not only the future of NATO but the broader architecture of international security for years to come. Whether the alliance can successfully navigate the tensions between unity and differentiation, between trans-Atlantic solidarity and European autonomy, between institutional resilience and the need for strategic renewal, will depend on the political will of its members and their capacity to translate shared interests into coherent collective action. In other words, both change and continuity will go on in the alliance.

Beyond Humanitarian Catastrophe: The Sudan War, the Crisis of Sovereignty, and the State’s Struggle for Survival

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:29:00 GMT

This commentary argues that the war in Sudan should be understood not only as a humanitarian catastrophe but also as an existential struggle over sovereignty, state survival, and institutional continuity. Since April 2023, international attention has largely focused on displacement, hunger, civilian suffering, and the collapse of basic services. While these dimensions are indispensable, a purely humanitarian framework obscures the deeper political and strategic nature of the conflict. The war represents a confrontation between the Sudanese state, embodied institutionally by the Sudanese Armed Forces, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a militia structure sustained by external support networks, cross-border logistics, and foreign fighters. By examining the RSF’s militia character, the internationalization of the conflict, the atrocities in Darfur, and the wider regional security implications, this article contends that lasting peace in Sudan requires the restoration of state authority, the protection of sovereignty, accountability for crimes, and the dismantling of parallel armed structures.

From Flank to Center: Türkiye, NATO, and the Ankara Summit

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:31:00 GMT

As NATO approaches its 2026 Ankara Summit, the alliance faces its most demanding transformation since the end of the Cold War. Türkiye’s role within NATO has undergone a fundamental strategic shift, from a southeastern flank state providing territorial depth to a central, operationally indispensable ally shaping the alliance’s deterrence posture, institutional direction, and crisis management capacity. Drawing on Türkiye’s sustained operational contributions, its 360-degree security approach, and its demonstrated capacity to project force and exercise command at scale, the commentary contends that the Ankara Summit represents a defining moment, one at which this repositioning must be reflected in the alliance’s political and institutional frameworks. It also issues a clear warning: the European Union’s exclusionary approach to non-member NATO allies risks inflicting strategic damage on Euro-Atlantic security that would exceed even the consequences of reduced American force presence on the continent.

Belgium’s View on the Ankara Summit and Türkiye’s Role in NATO

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:32:00 GMT

This commentary examines Belgium’s priorities and expectations for the Ankara NATO Summit. It argues that the Summit should be structured around three core agenda items: defense-industrial integration, Europe’s growing responsibility for its own security, and the expansion of NATO’s geographical area of strategic attention. Drawing attention to the structural constraints of the alliance’s defense-industrial capacity, the commentary rejects a “buy European only” approach and proposes a model of defense-industrial cooperation based on transcontinental joint production lines and industrial partnerships. Within this framework, Türkiye’s expanding defense-industrial ecosystem is identified as a strategic asset, particularly through the contributions of actors such as ASELSAN, Roketsan, and Baykar. The article further argues that, as the United States increasingly shifts its strategic focus towards Asia, European allies must assume greater operational responsibility on NATO’s eastern flank. Finally, it contends that secure access to critical raw materials in Africa and reducing Chinese dominance over these resources are of existential importance to the alliance’s long-term defense capacity. It therefore calls for an expansion of NATO’s maritime agenda to encompass the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.

The Evolution of the Global Order and NATO’s Transformation: Türkiye’s Strategic Role Ahead of the Ankara Summit

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:38:00 GMT

This commentary examines NATO’s evolving role in a multipolar and multi-layered world order, with particular attention to the pressures generated by shifting transatlantic relations, European strategic autonomy debates, hybrid threats, technological innovation, and burden sharing. Within this broader context, the analysis highlights Türkiye’s strategic significance as a long-standing NATO ally, emphasizing her military capabilities, geographical position, defense industry capacity, counterterrorism experience, and diplomatic reach. It argues that Türkiye is no longer merely a troop contributing member of the alliance, but a strategic enabler that provides NATO with operational flexibility, regional insight, and geopolitical depth. The commentary also discusses the challenges in Türkiye-NATO relations, including historical grievances, divergent threat perceptions, defense restrictions, relations with Russia, and tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ultimately, it presents the upcoming NATO Ankara Summit as a defining moment for both the alliance and Türkiye, arguing that NATO’s future effectiveness will depend on its ability to combine transformation with unity, while better recognizing Türkiye’s indispensable role in the evolving global security architecture.

Security Culture of NATO: Slow-Paced but Deterrent

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:38:00 GMT

This study examines the security culture of Treaty Organization through a systematic analytical framework grounded in organizational culture theory and behavioral dynamics. It argues that NATO has developed a sui generis security culture since its foundation. The research proposes a 10-parameter reference model developed for this article, built on the behavioral cascade to assess the depth, coherence, and the current vulnerabilities of the Alliance’s institutional culture. The 10 parameters are evaluated sequentially against NATO’s historical record and contemporary posture. The study concludes that NATO has satisfied each of these parameters to a degree that places it among the most institutionally mature security organizations in the international system. However, also identifies significant challenges across multiple layers of the cultural cascade, including divergent threat perceptions among key allies, the erosion of agreed-upon narratives, the fragmentation in armament, and unprecedented strain on political will. The study concludes that NATO’s security culture remains structurally resilient but stands at a critical juncture, requiring active political reaffirmation by its member states.

NATO in 21st Century: Managing Maritime Security across Gray Zones

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:40:00 GMT

NATO’s primary challenge in 2026 is no longer limited to deterring conventional aggression; it is managing the gray zones that increasingly define its borderlands. From the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and across the Mediterranean and the Gulf, the Alliance faces a common pattern of hybrid coercion, maritime disruption, infrastructure sabotage, drone incursions, and ambiguous escalation below the threshold of war. Although these challenges are often treated as separate regional problems, the Baltic-Black Sea corridor and the southern flank are becoming strategically interconnected theaters shaped by similar threats and vulnerabilities. The Ankara Summit should therefore prioritize a coherent borderland strategy focused on situational awareness, resilience, attribution, integrated air and maritime defense, and stronger political mechanisms for responding to gray zone pressure before it undermines deterrence and Alliance cohesion.

A World in Transition and Transatlantic Alliance at a Crossroads

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:41:00 GMT

At a time when the international order is undergoing profound transformation, the Transatlantic Alliance has reached one of the most critical junctures in its history. This commentary assesses the potential implications of the Ankara Summit for the Alliance by examining NATO’s structural tensions, internal fractures, and institutional adaptability. It addresses the pressure exerted on European allies by the Trump Administration’s transactional approach to alliance commitment, the strategic shift from burden-sharing toward a “burden revolution,” and the structural tension between the EU’s emerging defense architecture and NATO’s principle of indivisible security. The study also places particular emphasis on Türkiye’s distinctive position within the Alliance. With NATO’s second-largest military, an expanding defense-industrial ecosystem, and a bridge-building diplomatic role, Türkiye stands as a strategic axis in NATO’s process of reconfiguration. Finally, the commentary emphasizes that a transition toward a more Europe-centered alliance structure, marked by a gradual retrenchment of the United States, may be possible. However, political will and credible mechanisms of trust remain indispensable to ensuring institutional continuity.

Multi-layered Criminality in the 2026 Iran-U.S./Israel War

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:42:00 GMT

Contemporary armed conflicts increasingly defy analysis within a single legal framework. This article advances the concept of multi-layered criminality to explain how one factual matrix may simultaneously engage the law on the use of force, international humanitarian law, and international criminal law. Focusing on the 2026 U.S.-Israeli operations against Iran, it demonstrates how allegations of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity can arise concurrently without collapsing their distinct legal thresholds. Drawing on treaty law, jurisprudence, official statements, United Nations materials, and open-source investigations, the commentary offers a calibrated appraisal of an evolving evidentiary record. It argues that the available material raises a serious question regarding the legality of the resort to force, substantiates grave war-crime concerns, and justifies a structured –yet not definitive– Article 7 inquiry. By integrating doctrinal rigor with cumulative analysis, the article challenges both fragmentation and overextension in contemporary international criminal law.

NATO, the 2026 Iran Crisis, and the Emergence of a Multi-Layered Alliance

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:43:00 GMT

The 2026 Iran crisis reveals important changes in NATO’s cohesion dynamics, demonstrating that alliance unity is increasingly shaped by diverging threat perceptions, strategic priorities, and risk assessments among member states. While the U.S. adopts a more confrontational and deterrence-oriented approach toward Iran, many European allies emphasize diplomacy, energy security, and regional stability, highlighting persistent trans-Atlantic differences over the appropriate response to extra-regional security challenges. The crisis surrounding the Strait of Hormuz illustrates the limitations of NATO’s collective defense framework in addressing conflicts that do not directly trigger Article 5 obligations, as well as the challenges of achieving political coordination when allies interpret security threats differently. This article employs a qualitative case study methodology, examining official statements, alliance documents, and academic literature to analyze how threat perceptions, energy vulnerability, European strategic autonomy, and institutional mechanisms shape NATO’s response. The findings suggest that NATO is not experiencing institutional decline but is evolving toward a more differentiated, multi-layered alliance structure in which formal commitments coexist with varying levels of political alignment, operational participation, and strategic prioritization. The 2026 Iran crisis therefore demonstrates that contemporary alliance cohesion depends less on automatic solidarity and more on the ability of institutions to manage strategic divergence while preserving cooperation.

Who Holds the Keys? Nuclear Sharing, Multilateralism, and the Credibility of NATO’s Nuclear Posture

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:44:00 GMT

Why did NATO, despite commanding a nuclear arsenal larger and more capable than Russia’s, yield to Putin’s nuclear blackmail at the outset of the Ukraine War? This paper locates the source of that weakness in a structural transformation of NATO’s nuclear sharing framework. Drawing on the theory of collective deterrence, it argues that arrangements mounted by multiple states are burdened by problems of preference aggregation, implementation, and coordination that intensify as their multilateral character deepens. NATO’s nuclear sharing was originally devised to escape these pathologies, embedding a bilateral logic in the dual-key arrangement that lowered the commitment threshold for nuclear employment. The paper contends that post-Cold War enlargement, by importing Eastern European members whose threat perceptions toward Russia diverged sharply from those of the existing nuclear hosts, dismantled the consensus that had sustained the drawdown of forward-deployed weapons and, in halting it, quietly supplanted this bilateral logic with a multilateral one. Putin’s gambit, the paper concludes, was not an act of strategic recklessness but a calculated exploitation of these weaknesses, and one likely to recur.

From Bridge to Hub: Türkiye’s Strategic Repositioning in NATO’s Emerging Geoeconomic Security Architecture

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:45:00 GMT

This article argues that NATO’s emerging geoeconomic security architecture calls for a reinterpretation of Türkiye’s role within the alliance and that this shift is best understood as a strategic repositioning through a hub-state logic. As resilience, critical infrastructure protection, supply-chain security, energy continuity, civil preparedness, cyber defense, and defense-industrial capacity move closer to the operational core of deterrence and defense, economic security becomes increasingly tied to the conditions of military-strategic effectiveness. In this setting, Türkiye’s value lies less in possession alone than in the extent to which its assets can be converted, through positionality, into alliance-relevant leverage. To explain this reorientation, the article proceeds from the distinction between power as possession and power as positionality and develops power pricing and power valuation as analytical tools for rethinking strategic value under conditions of deepening interdependence. Through this framework, it examines four dimensions of Türkiye’s hub-state role (routing, switching, buffering, and synchronizing) to show how the country contributes to alliance continuity, crisis management, regional coordination, and diplomatic intermediation across a wider geoeconomic periphery.

From Liberal Order to Protectionism: Trump’s Gambit to Refashion America’s Trade Policy

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:45:00 GMT

This analysis examines the Trump Administration’s drive to transform U.S. trade policy from multilateral liberalism to aggressive protectionism, the sharpest break with postwar economic orthodoxy in seven decades. Drawing on economic data, opinion research, and policy analysis, it argues that the shift constituted not a tactical adjustment but an ideological reorientation: Trade reconceived as an instrument of national assertion rather than mutual prosperity. Contrary to conventional expectations, the turn was driven by elite strategic calculation rather than popular demand, as American consumers consistently prioritized price over origin and showed little appetite for tariffs. The Trump-Vance coalition weaponized the real grievances of deindustrialization, recasting structural dislocation as moral betrayal requiring punitive remedy. A tariff escalation reaching levels unseen since the 1930s functioned less as an engine of industrial revival than as a symbol of restored sovereignty, its costs accepted as proof of resolve. The contest with China anchors this statecraft and rests on a durable bipartisan consensus. Herein lies the central paradox: the protectionist turn reproduces the elite, state-led character of the liberal order it repudiates, exposing continuity beneath rhetorical rupture.

From Mandate Legacy to Protracted Conflict: A PSC Analysis of the Syrian Civil War and Prospects for Structural Transformation

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:46:00 GMT

This study examines why the Syrian civil war evolved into a permanent conflict dynamic through Edward Azar’s Protracted Social Conflict (PSC) theory. While the conflict is often explained through sectarian divisions, geopolitical competition, and the political involvement of regional and global actors, this article argues that deeper structural factors have sustained the violence. Using a historical-sociopolitical qualitative approach, the study analyzes the Syrian armed conflict through Azar’s core components: identity-based fragmentation, social exclusion, political exclusion, unmet basic human needs, social security concerns, and external intervention. The findings indicate that weak national identity, persistent social exclusion, and the concentration of political and economic power among specific identity groups undermined state legitimacy and contributed to the persistence of the internal armed conflict. The study also shows that the political involvement of regional and global powers through proxy warfare expanded the conflict beyond domestic boundaries, linking it to broader international armed conflicts and regional struggles.

The Emerging Multipolarity and Implications of (Dis)Engagement of the U.S. Foreign Policy in the Western Balkans

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:47:00 GMT

Since the end of the Cold War, the Western orientation of the Balkans has been an important topic for the U.S. However, the region has ceased to be a priority object for the U.S. foreign policy since the early 2000s and the 2008 economic crisis led the EU to downgrade its enlargement agenda creating a vacuum that enabled the non-Western actors, notably Russia and China to extend their influence over the region. This study offers a comparative and multi-actor analysis combining the regional developments with systemic-level shifts. It aims to examine the rise of multipolarity and the reflections of geopolitical competition in the Western Balkans in the post-Cold War era. It argues that despite the reduced U.S. involvement, the American engagement still remains crucial for the regional stability. Given the EU’s weakening role, this article contributes to the literature by analyzing how the great power rivalry among the U.S., Russia, and China shapes the stability in the Western Balkans with a particular attention to the developments in BIH and Kosovo.

Taming the Trojan Horse: How Turkish Foreign Policy Can Reconceptualize UNESCO’s Neoliberal Cultural Agenda

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:48:00 GMT

This article critically examines whether the UNESCO contemporary cultural policy framework, particularly its embrace of the creative economy, functions as a form of neoliberal governance and explores the implications of this shift for Türkiye’s cultural diplomacy and foreign policy positioning within UNESCO. It argues that, although UNESCO was founded on principles of cultural diversity, peace, and international cooperation, its post‑2000 cultural agenda increasingly frames culture through economic indicators such as employment, competitiveness, and export potential. Methodologically, the study conducts a qualitative policy analysis of UNESCO’s core cultural policy instruments, with particular emphasis on the 2005 Convention, and situates this analysis within the critical literature on cultural policy and the creative economy. Türkiye is used as a central case to examine how a middle power country navigates, internalizes, and potentially contests this policy framework within a global governance context.

Ethnic Identity and Human Rights: An Examination of Rwanda

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:48:00 GMT

This study examines the 1994 Rwandan genocide through the interconnected dimensions of ethnic identity, colonial legacy, state violence, and human rights. It investigates how ethnic categories institutionalized during the colonial period were transformed into instruments of political annihilation by the modern state and evaluates this process within the framework of international human rights law. The analysis demonstrates that colonial administrations racialized Hutu and Tutsi identities, creating conditions for long-term political conflict. The genocide is interpreted not as a sudden social breakdown but as the outcome of sustained ideological construction, state-sponsored discrimination, and militarization. The study further assesses the legal characterization of the atrocities under the United Nations definition of genocide and examines violations of fundamental human rights, including the rights to life, health, and security. Finally, it discusses the challenges of peacebuilding and reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda. The findings highlight the importance of integrating security policies with a human rights-based approach to prevent the recurrence of mass violence.

NATO and International Law in Transition: Institutional Evolution, Collective Self-Defense, and the War in Ukraine

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 15:50:00 GMT

Verhelst highlights the institutional and constitutional questions arising from NATO’s expansion beyond its original treaty framework; Green demonstrates the continuing centrality of CSD within contemporary international law; and Eichler situates the Alliance within the broader dynamics of post-Cold War security competition. Despite their methodological differences, all three authors underscore the enduring relevance of collective defense in an era characterized by hybrid threats, technological interdependence, and renewed great-power rivalry.