The Status of an Insulator State and the Reconfiguration of Turkey’s Maritime Strategies in Response to Security Challenges

The roots of the change in Turkey's maritime policy and the country's efforts to overcome the "insulator state" status are the issues that the present paper examines using the Copenhagen School’s regional security complex theory and the theory-based process analysis method. The research hypothesis is that Turkey, through the re-creation of maritime strategies and the increase of its naval power, is trying to elevate its strategic position from a state of isolation within regional security complexes to the level of an independent great power. The findings of the study show that Turkey, realizing its structural weakness resulting from the inability to establish a sustainable link with the peripheral security complexes, especially Europe, the Middle East and the post-Soviet area, has gradually sought to revive its maritime identity since the ۱۹۷۰s by combining three factors: intra-organizational, geopolitical and discursive. The emergence of the “Blue Homeland” discourse, as an objective manifestation of the transformation in maritime thought, indicates that Turkey’s maritime policy has evolved from a coastal defense strategy in the post-Ottoman period to a power-building strategy aimed at achieving a level of trans-regional security self-help in the post-Cold War period. This study shows that Turkey, by increasingly relying on its indigenous military-industrial capabilities, is trying to play an active role in regional and international security, without necessarily being integrated into one of the regional security complexes. Moreover, Turkey's maritime strategy appears to be part of a broader geopolitical agenda aimed at escaping security marginalization and restoring its civilizational power on a global scale. This strategy has the potential to transform Turkey from a subordinate actor into a leading player in regional and international security domains.

کلیدواژه ها:

Turkey ، Insulator state ، Reconfiguration ، Naval strategies ، Navy