Disciplinary Boundaries and Methodological Issues of Teaching Geopolitics in Turkey

Year 2024, Volume: 13 Issue: 1, 1 - 17, 24.01.2024

Cem Savaş

https://doi.org/10.20991/allazimuth.1413453

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.

Keywords

Geopolitics, Political Science and International Relations (IR) Curricula, Teaching, Methodology, Turkey

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