Disciplinary Boundaries and Methodological Issues of Teaching Geopolitics in Turkey

Abstract

This study aims to present a critical portrayal of teaching geopolitics at Turkish
 universities by assessing both undergraduate and graduate levels of Political
 Science and International Relations (IR) curricula. Geopolitical analysis has gone
 through several phases and traditions by conceiving space as a crucial element
 for representing world politics. In addition to interstate rivalries, geopolitics also
 refers to many conflicts and rivalries within an intrastate framework in the context
 of multiple territorial scales. While geopolitics seems to be falsely perceived as
 something equal to a state-centric and hard realist academic subfield under a
 strong military tutelage in Turkey, it lacks a broad multi-level analysis, as well
 as geographical and historical reasoning. In this study, I propose to consider
 cartography, territoriality, and geopolitical representations, which form the
 basis of contemporary geopolitical analysis. The article evaluates weekly
 schedules, learning outcomes, content, and objectives of the courses available
 on the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) information
 packages on university websites. Based on a qualitative case study, it eventually
 aims to improve the methodological character of geopolitics teaching, indirectly
 influencing the level and quality of geopolitics in Turkey.