E-town Professor Oya Dursun-Ozkanca examines the politics of intra-alliance opposition
Elizabethtown College Professor of Political Science and Endowed Chair of International Studies, Oya Dursun-Ozkanca recently published the book, Turkey–West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition. With Turkey’s relations with the West at an all-time low, Dursun-Ozkanca provides a timely examination of Turkey growing further apart from its Western
allies.
“The analysis here contributes to the empirical and conceptual development of the scholarly literature on intra-alliance opposition by distilling different tools that are at the disposal of the secondary powers within alliances into three categories of intra-alliance opposition behavior: boundary testing, boundary challenging, and boundary-breaking,” Dursun-Ozkanca said. “The framework of intra-alliance opposition delineates the motivations for such states to engage in different stages of opposition within an alliance.”
Since 2003, Dursun-Ozkanca has been researching and writing about Turkish foreign policy. In her timely book, she dissects six case studies regarding Turkish foreign policy over the past nine years, exploring an array of topics including Turkey’s foreign policy in relation to various nations and organizations, the refugee crisis, defense procurement, energy policies, and more.
“The book represents one of the first balancing studies using elite interviews as data,” Dursun-Ozkanca said. “It draws on extensive fieldwork and over 200 semi-structured elite interviews conducted with government officials, diplomats, academics, intergovernmental (IGO) and non-governmental organization (NGO) officials, and journalists in Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the United States from 2011 to 2017.”
Dursun-Ozkanca’s book, Turkey–West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition, published by Cambridge University-Press, is available for purchase on the Cambridge University Press website and Amazon.