The Concept of Security in Turkish History and Culture

Abstract

An analysis of the evolution of academic approaches to security issues in Turkish politics will help shed light on the development of Turkish political thought and the main theories and ideas that served as a catalyst for this process. This study is especially relevant in the modern context when the Turkish political establishment is regarded as more private and the underlying foreign policy documents are primarily classified. In addition, this study is able to give a new evaluation of a number of problems related to changes in the foreign policy of the Republic of Türkiye and provide a more relevant understanding of the logic behind Ankara's actions. The subject of this paper is the philosophical and theoretical justification of the Turkish state's political approach to security issues. The main methodological tools in this regard seem historical-chronological and historicalgenetic methods — their use will allow to consider and highlight the causal factors in the evolution of Turkey's approaches to ensuring its own security. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the issues of the evolution of the security concept in the Turkish political discourse have been little addressed in Russian Turkology and mainly do not go beyond the foreign policy of the ruling Justice and Development Party. The present paper aims at a comprehensive study of security issues in the perspective of Turkish history from the early days of the Beylik of Osman to the modern Republic of Türkiye. The conducted research shows that Turkish political thought has gradually changed according to Türkiye's foreign policy agenda and the goals that the ruling circles of the Turkish state set for themselves throughout its history.