Week: Our Perspectives

Posts from the ISN, CSS and guest writers

Turkish Foreign Policy: Goodbye to “Zero Problems”?

Catherine Ashton with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu
Catherine Ashton with Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. Photo: European External Action Service – EEAS/flickr.

On November 3 2012, the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) (Justice and Development Party – JDP) celebrated the 10th anniversary of its landslide victory in the 2002 Turkish general election. Founded a year earlier, the AKP won 363 out of 550 seats in the Grand National Assembly.Ankara’s new administration immediately set about reforming. And arguably one of the domains where reforms have been most noticeable is that of Turkey’s foreign policy. Once described as “one-dimensional”, “reactive”, “passive” and “hesitant”, successive AKP administrations transformed Turkish foreign policy into something far more ambitious, assertive and independent.

When discussing Turkish foreign policy after 2002, it is difficult – if not impossible – not to mention Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and his book “Stratejik Derinlik” (Strategic Depth). Turkey’s strategic depth, according to Davutoğlu, “rests on its geographical and historical depth”. The country’s location in the midst of Afro-Eurasia and its Ottoman past “provides Turkey with a unique set of relations with its neighboring countries and at the same time places the country in a position to relate to and influence…developments”. Accordingly,Turkey seeks to use its strategic depth to promote stability and peace in its neighboring regions, an outlook that is often referred to as Ankara’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy. This essentially involves improving or re-establishing economic and political ties with Turkey’s neighboring countries.

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What Afghans Want From the West

Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 215th Corps on patrol in Sangin, Helmand
Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 215th Corps on patrol in Sangin, Helmand. Photo: Al Jazeera English/flickr.

The date of the withdrawal of most of Western forces from Afghanistan is approaching but the war and the state of the war in Afghanistan continue. The US consolidates its strategic military bases in Afghanistan while it is talking about pulling out. Despite this conflicting narrative, the Western disentanglement in Afghanistan gives rises to two crucial and conjointly defined questions. First, how will Western drawdown shape the future of Afghanistan? Second, how will the major post-withdrawal power vacuum in south and Central Asia makes the geopolitical map of south and Central Asia and by consequence, the global power structure?

Both the power vacuum and global power structure gravitate largely on the outcome of the war in Afghanistan and the future of ungoverned titanic mountain ranges between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a leftover of the nineteenth-century British colonialism.  History let Afghanistan in a unique geopolitical position. The turbulent developments in the last two centuries show that this country—was once described by the late Richard Nixon as the “turnstile of the fate of Asia,”—has been a transit area for the emerging powers in the region and its future has been determined by adventurous foreign interventions. This truth makes the Afghan theatre of war merely a sideshow in the larger regional and international contention that was termed by Kipling ‘the Great Game,’ in Central Asia.

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São Paulo: Insecure Citizens, All of Them

Primeiro Comando da Capital 15 33
Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) is a non-state armed group in São Paulo, Brazil. Photo: Marco Gomes/flickr.

In recent years, São Paulo, Brazil has like many other Latin American cities, been held up as a model of public security for other cities in the global South. Dramatic declines in homicides by more than 80% in some urban districts, has created a sense that the city is safer than ever. By extension, many have supposed and some explicitly argued that heightened public security policies are the reason for such declines.

A recent spate of hundreds of homicides, killings by the police force (known until recently as resistencias seguida de morte), and assassinations of police officers, tells a much different story. This violence lays bare the sub-structure of homicide regulation in the city. Since the early 2000’s, São Paulo’s decline in homicides has been intimately intertwined with the increasing influence of a non-state armed group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC). The PCC, which controls many of the historically violent parts of the city, has its own regulation of death. This underscores the breakdown of the monopoly on violence in the city and exposes the relative impossibility of public policy advancement. More importantly, though, this new wave of violence reveals the degree of insecurity in this city where those most responsible for delivering public security policy – the police – are not secure.

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Mediation Perspectives: Visioning the Future and Dealing with the Past

Flag of Concert of Parties for Democracy (Concertación)
Flag of Concert of Parties for Democracy (Concertación), a Chilean political coalition founded in 1989. Image: B1mbo/Wikimedia Commons.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s 2012 film No, about the 1988 plebiscite that brought an end to General Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, vividly captures the tensions between a society’s need to be forward-looking at times of political transition (be this at the end of dictatorship or at the end of violent conflict) and its need to deal with past injustice. On March 5th 1988 Chileans were asked to vote whether General Pinochet should stay in power for another eight-year term. The film focuses on the television campaign aired by advocates of the “No” vote in the days leading up to the referendum. Veterans of the anti-Pinochet opposition, many of them victims of the state’s repressive apparatus, called for a campaign that would showcase past crimes: forced disappearances, torture, and killings.

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Implications of Independence: Scottish Defence

Referendum consultation - press conference
Referendum consultation, press conference. Photo: Scottish Government/flickr.

When the Scottish National Party (SNP) won the majority of seats in the 2007 parliamentary elections, the movement for Scottish independence had finally gained momentum. With the referendum now set for 18 September 2014, the idea of an independent Scotland, once a distant dream of SNP-supporters, has now become a realistic possibility. Although opinion polls currently predict an outcome favoring “devolution-plus” – extensive regionalisation and decentralisation – rather than fully-fledged independence, the possible implications of a “Yes” vote are worth considering given the wide-ranging consequences of such a result, particularly in the area of defence.

A pro-independence decision would likely lead to uncertainty caused by a range of policy conundrums not only for Scotland but for the rest of the UK. In an effort to alleviate such fears, the Scottish government has announced that it will publish a White Paper on the possible future structure of an independent Scotland. But while the Scottish government has adopted an optimistic view, 10 Downing Street has already released a report emphasizing the possible negative repercussions, were Scotland to terminate the more than 300-year old Union.

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