scholarly journals Exploring the Traits of a Grand Strategy for Turkey: Resilience, Protean Power, and Connectography

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (Fall 2021) ◽  
pp. 77-94
Author(s):  
Hasan Yükselen
Keyword(s):  
International System ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
Realist Analysis

The international system is experiencing profound changes and has taken on an uncertain character as a result. The concept of strategy and its study has closely followed this trend, and new concepts have emerged both to adapt to and theoretically describe the practical changes and challenges it has engendered. This article explores the ill-suited features of mainstream debates and theorizing from a Turkish perspective and suggests that a critical realist analysis of agential strategizing is most useful to addressing the emerging context. It argues that Turkey has a long pursued grand strategy, but new concepts –resilience, protean power, and connectography– can enhance Turkey’s ability to strategize and can enrich the lately emerged vibrant debates exploring Turkey’s grand strategy.

Turkey’s Strategic Conduct under the Changing International System

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (Fall 2021) ◽  
pp. 119-146
Author(s):  
Murat Yeşiltaş ◽  
Ferhat Pirinççi
Keyword(s):  
Security Policy ◽  
International System ◽  
International Order ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Foreign And Security Policy ◽  
Characteristic Features

This article analyses how Turkey should orient its grand strategy under the changing international order. It claims that the international order has undergone a significant transformation that is pushing Turkey to relocate its international position. First, the article analyses the characteristic features of the changing dynamics of the international system; it then sheds light on the new aspects of Turkey’s changing strategic landscape. By taking into consideration the transformation in Turkish foreign and security policy since the Arab Uprising, the article argues that Turkey needs a basis for determining what is important and what is not, what the primary threats to the nation’s interests are, and how best to serve those interests in a way that is attentive to the costs and risks it is willing to bear. Our aim in this article is to describe how Turkey can deal with the new reality of the international system and pursue and protect its important interests by developing a comprehensive grand strategy.

Revising the Socio-Technical Perspective for the 21st Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Louise Harder Fischer ◽  
Richard Baskerville
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Technical System ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Systems Research ◽  
Information Systems Research ◽  
Parallel Structures ◽  
Realist Analysis ◽  
Collaboration Platforms

A predominant understanding in information systems research (ISR) is that technology has institutionalizing, routinizing, and socializing effects in its interaction with users in the human enterprise. Subscribing to these effects from an organizational point of view no longer provides a full understanding of the more complex dynamics in the 21st century workplace inhabited by a vast amount of different technologies with different purposes. Through a critical realist analysis, focusing on patterns in socio-technical structures and more specific actions and outcomes afforded by the recent and forceful adoption of unified communication and collaboration platforms (UCC), the authors see a new, powerful socio-technical mechanism of individualization that is profoundly changing these socio-technical dynamics. Through 18 interviews with knowledge professionals, the study finds that the mechanisms of individualization reduce the influence of the organization as an institutionalizing and socializing socio-technical system. As an example, the power of individualization creates new parallel structures of small networks of close colleagues. Thus, this research sees new structural patterns and dynamics emerging, forming a much more complex, yet self-organizing socio-technical system. The authors suggest expanding the socio-technical understanding of the present techno-organizational reality by taking into account the socio-technical mechanisms that produce certain outcomes. By understanding the fundamental mechanisms at work, they provide those with a fuller understanding of how these mechanisms can enable, while simultaneously crippling, each other. This fuller understanding also aids the pursuit of providing workplaces that achieve both humanistic and economic objectives.

The Domestic Sources of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 238-255
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Caverley
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International System ◽  
The Other ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
International Economic Relations ◽  
Strategic Role ◽  
Domestic Sources ◽  
Almost All

Over the past decades of American-dominated International Relations, research on domestic sources of grand strategy has largely coalesced around the liberal ends of democracy and free trade. Given increasing Sino-American competition, this chapter predicts a turn to a more robust International Relations research program on the role that domestic ideas and material factors play in shaping grand strategy. This research will focus as much on the means of grand strategy as the ends. Much work already examines how democracy (and nondemocracy) can drive grand strategy, and important states in contemporary international politics differ on this front. On the other hand, almost all the major powers in the international system remain quite liberal in their international economic relations—the other concern of research on domestic influences on grand strategy. This chapter delves further into the grand-strategic role of regime type and the form of capitalism practiced within the state. It then suggests two additional under-researched domestic-level factors—militarism and nationalism—that will shape grand strategy in the coming years.

Intimate Pleasures and the Madness of Love

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Tulloch ◽  
Belinda Middleweek
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
The Real ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Social Aesthetics ◽  
Sexually Explicit ◽  
Realist Analysis ◽  
Sociological History ◽  
Current Risk

Chapter 7 analyzes the real sex films Ken Park and Irréversible in the context of different sexual/social aesthetics in sexually explicit films by drawing on “old” and “new” forms of narrative theory as a “bridging synthesis” of disciplinary approaches. The different generations of narrative theory alluded to in this chapter concern Will Wright’s old critical realist analysis of the Western genre and Tanya Krzywinska’s new, postmodernist “narrative formula” approach. This chapter opens with narrative comparison of one European and one US real sex film to point to their similar narrative reversals and contradictions in the context of the “normal chaos of love,” with a major focus on Ken Park’s narrative. Wright’s and Krzywinska’s theoretically and generationally different versions of narrative theory are thus drawn together in terms of current risk sociological history and distinguished from each other epistemologically for further consideration in later chapters.

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