Turkey’s economic rapprochement towards Syria and the territorial conflict over Hatay

This article addresses the Justice and Development Party’s economic rapprochement towards Syria since 2002. While, the literature tackling the Turkish economic foreign policy has mainly focused on the reasons behind the rise of Turkey’s trade, this study argues that Turkey’s economic policy contributed to the alleviation of the Hatay issue, a historical territorial conflict that marked bilateral relations for long decades.     

Authoritarianism and Virtual Regionalism: The Gulf Cooperation Council during Arab Uprisings

In spite of the inability of Gulf countries to develop a successful collective security strategy as asserted by the existing literature, the study contends that they have exceptionally adopted it toward their domestic uprisings. Based on the security regime theory, this study argues that threats of revolutionary sociopolitical change incentivize authoritarian regimes, such as Gulf countries, to formulate a collective security strategy within multilateral instances. By relying on a critical discourse analysis, the study traces Gulf countries’ perception of the different uprisings as reported by different national newspapers from December 2010 till March 2018.     

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational advocacy in Turkey: a new means of political participation

This study examines the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s transnational media advocacy as a shift in the Islamists’ political participation in general and the Brothers’ in particular. The article argues that the Brothers created their own TV channels in order to challenge the new regime’s legitimacy after 3 July 2013 by taking advantage of a sympathetic political environment in Turkey. Their media advocacy embraced a collective Islamic identity in its denunciation of the Sisi regime and called for a democratic restitution as a common Egyptian cause. Based on interviews conducted with TV presenters and a content analysis of the expatriates’ TV channels, this study presents transnational advocacy as a novelty in the Islamists’ repertoire of action.     

Marginalizing Revolutionaries in Egypt’s Civil State Debate

After President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown on February 11, 2011, competing narratives emerged about the Egyptian civil state during the formulation of the 2012 and 2014 constitutions. Arguably, the army’s political domination and the Islamic–secular rivalry were behind the marginalization of young activists, militants in social movements, and many other civilians known as revolutionaries who took part in the January 25 Revolution, during the formulation of both constitutions.

The following offers two new perspectives in the analysis of peaceful democratic transition in Egypt after the revolution. First, it relies on the analysis of the different actors’ discourses about civil state in order to show how both constitutions overlooked the revolutionaries’ vision and impeded peaceful democratic transition. Second, it addresses the civil state debate on which writings related to democratic transition in the Middle East remained silent and rather focusing on military–Islamist relations, the political economy of post-revolutionary regimes, and alliance shifts in foreign policy.