Incirlik Ussu: ABD'nin Us Politikasi ve Turkiye (Incirlik Military Base: Military Base politics of the US and Turkey).

• Author: Kucukkeles, Mujge
• Position: Book review

Incirlik Ussu: ABD'nin Us Politikasi ve Turkiye (Incirlik Military Base: Military Base Politics of the US and Turkey)

By Selin M. BOlme

Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2012, 430 pages., ISBN 9789750509940.

AMERICAN military bases, long identified with US interests, have always been a controversial subject among scholars. A significant increase in the number of military bases possessed by the United States around the world following World War Two is striking to observe. Many different arguments have been developed to try to understand the dynamics and motives behind the establishment of such a great number of these bases, the most commonly held one is that these military bases serve the strategic and geopolitical interests of the United States. But don't they also help expand the US's sphere of ideological influence?

Turkey, as a country that began to host US military bases when it joined NATO, hasn't stayed outside discussions over military bases. Their legal status and the functions of the bases have led to heated debates among the political elite of the country. Given the high levels of anti-American public sentiment in the country this is nothing but normal. However, despite how long the bases have been around and the high visibility of the issue in the country, it is striking to see the absence of academic studies that delve into the role of American military bases in Turkey in an analytic and systematic manner. Incirlik Military Base: Military Base Politics of the US and Turkey by Dr. Selin Bolme sets to fill this gap in academic literature and paves the way for further research on the military aspects of Turkish-American relations.

With reference to the Incirlik military base, the book examines a wide array of issues ranging from the politics of military bases for the US and to the impact of such bases on American hegemony in general, and to Turkish-American relations in particular. The author compiles her arguments in three parts. In the first part, Bolme introduces the concept and emergence of military bases. A meticulous analysis of various concepts that are interchangeably and often mistakenly used for one another in daily discussions is worth noting for eliminating the confusion encountered in categorizing and describing the types of military bases. But it is not only a conceptual analysis that the book provides. The author also does a good job of portraying the continuities and discontinuities in the base concept itself in...