| Summary/Abstract |
The Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) policymakers have aimed to position Turkey as the leader of the Middle East by assessing its soft power since they came to power. Drawing on Strategic Depth of Ahmet Davutoğlu, Prime Minister of Turkey, this article attempts to offer a critical constructivist, postcolonial and feminist analysis of Turkey’s recent foreign policy discourse in the region by showing how the myth of leadership is constitutive, and is constituted by Davutoğlu’s discourses on women/femininities and men/masculinities. The leadership is imagined by localising Enlightenment notions of masculinity through a re-reading of local traditions, namely Ottoman history and Islam. In doing so, Strategic Depth aims to feminise Turkey’s imagery without necessarily putting it out of the masculinity continuum. As such, Turkey mimics the West but differs from it so as to perpetuate a good masculinity over the people of the Middle East. Implicit in such an imagery, the text distinguishes itself from the competing self-perceptions (and masculinities) in the country, namely the Kemalist one. I further argue that this imagery underlies the recent hypermasculinisation of politics within and beyond the country when political elites feel threatened in the face of political crises.
|