Siyaset, Sanayii ve Akademi: 2002 Sonrası Türk Savunma Sanayiinin Büyük Atılımının Dinamikleri

Abstract

The successive developments in Turkish defense industry has become a core dominant narrative of the AK Party, led to an increasing interest in opposition parties, industrial and academic circles. While the political parties’ election manifestos reveal the role of party politics in shaping defense industry priorities, the general trend shows the rising level of political and societal awareness to meet the goal of localization, nationalization, and strategic autonomy as a part of national security strategy. The changing value of investing into defense industry has not only paved way to a nationalistic discourse but also encouraged the civilian engagement into defense sphere which has long been identified as the space dominated by the presence of military and engineers. This paper emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary understanding across various science disciplines to support studies of Turkish defense industry, and further promote the academia to engage more with the policymaking and industry. Besides, it stresses the necessity of developing a comprehensive blueprint to build and maintain a long-lasting collaborative culture and relationship between politics, industry and academia which is crucial to optimize the role and promises of political, military, economic, diplomatic and technological dimensions of national defense industry.