Geographical Imaginations of the Mediterranean Along Dichotomies of East-West/North-South

Year 2018, Akdeniz Özel Sayısı, 0 - 0, 02.08.2018

Sezgi Durgun Özkan

Abstract

This article endeavours to analyse the European and Turkish discourses regarding the concept of the

“Mediterranean” and its variations both in temporal and spatial terms. The theoretical inspiration

of this article comes from the “geographical imagination as a way of thinking about world politics

and considering the relative importance of places and the relationships between contested narratives

of a specific region or territory”. Hence this study will examine different geographical imaginations

of the Mediterranean region that are projected onto both Turkish and European political discourse.

The perspective which is engaged here involves the historical geography, or geosophy put forward by

J. K. Wright (1946) who assumed that geographical knowledge is not only a knowledge of physical

characteristics and natural resources, but is also something being defined and redefined by the

political imagination of the perceiver. So in this article a “geosophical” perspective will be applied to the

Mediterranean region that plays both a historical and strategic role in Euro-Turkish relations.

Keywords

Mediterranean, Geosophy, Geographical Imagination, East-West/North South Dichotomy, Political Geography

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