Turkiye as a Stabilizing Power in an Age of Turmoil.

• Author: Yavuzer, Seyla Saglik

By Fahrettin Altun

Academica Press, 2021, 188 pages, 55,95 TL, ISBN: 9781680537581

In Turkiye as a Stabilizing Power in an Age of Turmoil, Fahrettin Altun, Turkish Presidency's Director of Communications, focuses on Turkiye's role in the global world order. He presents a detailed analysis of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's foreign policy regarding civil wars, humanitarian tragedies, and structural shifts in neighboring countries, detailing the basic parameters of Turkiye's policy and the challenges the global system has faced over the past two decades.

Altun provides a critique of the contemporary international system and explicates how it is naturally possible to minimize conflict and instability by utilizing Turkiye's experiences and proposals for reforming the international system. He notes Turkiye's successful humanitarian assistance programs as a model for stability in an era of a global shakeout.

Due to regional and international developments in recent years and Turkiye's role therein, Altun re-conceptualizes Turkiye as a "stabilizing power" that seeks a "fairer world" and contributes to the stability of large regions from Syria to Libya and Africa to Cyprus. The author highlights the need for reforming the current world order, stressing that the existing order favors only the self-interests of the great-power countries.

Turkiye as a Stabilizing Power in an Age of Turmoil consists of four chapters and a conclusion. In the first chapter, "The Failure of the International Community in Humanitarian Assistance," Altun reveals the path and results of the U.S.-dominated world order and discusses the problems and failures of states due to the CO-VID-19 pandemic and its worldwide impacts. Altun delineates a correlation between current conflicts with humanitarian tragedies and the world atmosphere after 9/11 incident. He argues that the terrorist attacks created global solidarity, yet the aggressive position of the U.S. in regard to the attacks spawned irreversible conflict globally. In addition to the economic crisis that the world faced in 2008, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq during that period caused more tragedies in the region.

Altun claims that despite its normative discourse and promises, present-day international politics is grounded in the self-interests of a few players in the system, and the effectiveness of international institutions depends on how much they correspond to the interests of those players; wars, humanitarian...