Political and Social Sciences

This paper examines the dynamics of women-led non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in peacebuilding in Rwanda. Can women successfully lead peacebuilding initia- tives under the post-genocide environment that currently exists in Rwanda? How do they contribute to peacebuilding in this complex and sensitive political context? These questions and their corollaries are raised every day not only in Rwanda, but also in other post-conflict environments in Africa. This paper argues that women-led organizations have been generally successful in implementing various peacebuilding initiatives that challenge traditionally held masculine beliefs about the role of women in patriarchal societies.

After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the post-genocide government spearheaded the creation of genocide commemorations. Over the past two decades, political elites and survivors’ organizations have gone to great lengths to institutionalize the memorialization, including creating laws to protect the memory of the genocide from denialism. Ordinary Rwandans have responded to the annual commemorations using creative means of support for and disagreement with the government’s interpretation of their shared violent past. Music has been used as citizen-driven tool to both spread and criticize genocide memorialization nationally and beyond. While scholars have explored the politicization of state-organized mechanisms such as memorials, citizen-driven creative means remain largely unexplored. Addressing this gap in Rwandan memory scholarship, I examine how Kizito Mihigo, a famous post-genocide musician, used his individual memory of surviving the genocide against the Tutsi through music to contribute and respond to the annual commemorations of the genocide. I argue that Mihigo’s story and commemoration songs were politicized from the start but were intensified when he used his music to go beyond promoting genocide commemorations to questioning the events and when he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges.

In the last two decades following the 1994 genocide Rwanda has been praised internationally for its strong leadership and revamped governance structures. This has resulted in rapid economic development, restorative justice, homegrown peacebuilding approaches, the tackling of corruption, and restoring security in a country that some analysts had prematurely depicted a hopeless case in state failure. In particular, promotion of women’s rights has become a cornerstone of the Rwandan success story, but few scholars have examined the women who participated in this process and their positive contribution in rebuilding their communities. This article focuses on the role a small group of female leaders at different levels of society played in creating and fostering peacebuilding initiatives over the past two decades. It relies on secondary sources and the author’s observations of several processes in the Rwandan society for more than a decade. It focuses on constructive steps taken in Rwandan society to promote women’s leadership, which sets it apart from many other post-conflict countries while being aware of legitimate critiques of post-genocide Rwandan conditions.

This article examines the positionality of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge through fieldwork in qualitative research in Northern Uganda. While scholarly literature has evolved on the positionality and experiences of researchers from the Global North in (post)conflict environments, little is known about the positionality and experiences of local stakeholders in the production of knowledge. This article is based on interviews and focus groups with research assistants and respondents in Northern Uganda. Using a phenomenological approach, this article analyzes the positionality and experiences of these research associates and respondents during fieldwork. Three themes emerged from these interviews and are explored in this article: power, fatigue, and safety. This article emphasizes that researchers need to be reflexive in their practices and highlights the need to reexamine how researchers are trained in qualitative methods before going into the field. This article is further critical of the behavior of researchers and how research agendas impact local stakeholders during and after fieldwork.

This paper aims at exploring internal and external dynamics of Turkey-KRG energy relations. It argues that Turkey's fight against the PKK, its increasing energy need, the target of Turkish energy decision-makers to decrease the high reliance of the country on Russian and Iranian gas, Turkey's goal of emerging as an energy hub, the economic interests of Turkish business groups, the strained relations between Ankara and Baghdad, and Erbil-Baghdad conflict have been the major determinants of Turkey's energy strategy towards the KRG. The paper concludes that the independence referendum held by the KRG in September 2017 has serious implications for the future of the Ankara-Erbil energy partnership, depending on measures to be taken by Kurdish and Iraqi leaders.

The EU and NATO announced the start of their ‘strategic partnership’ with the Declaration on the ESDP in 2002. Through this strategic partnership, the two organizations aim to achieve their high-priority goals in the context of security and defence. Although the EU-NATO partnership is crucial for security, peace and stability in the world; a genuine strategic partnership between the EU and NATO has not yet been achieved because of different ‘obstacles’. The purpose of this work is to analyse how and to what extent the Cyprus conflict has limited this strategic partnership. The limitations caused by the conflict on the EU-NATO strategic partnership have been elaborated by analysing the current developments at the political and military-strategic levels and on the ground. Additionally, some case studies such as Kosovo and Afghanistan have been used to see the impact of the conflict on the EU-NATO cooperation. The conclusion of this study consists of some recommendations for possible measures that need to be taken by all the related parties in order to bring the on-going conflict on the island to an end and to achieve a fully-fledged strategic partnership.

Since energy has an impact on economy and security of countries, there is a direct link between energy and foreign policy. Energy is perceived as a way to make national foreign policy goals achieved. Therefore, energy relations between countries in the world take place at a larger context rather than just an energy issue. Analyzing the reasons behind the 1973 oil embargo clearly shows how energy can be used as a political weapon to achieve foreign policy goals. Russia is a very important actor in the field of energy. It is currently being accused of building energy leverage over the importing and transit countries in order to regain power and reputation which it lost since the Cold War. Turkey is a crucial energy transit country because it is so close to large energy supplier and consumer countries. Turkey is considered that it uses its geostrategic position as leverage to be a hegemony player in the region. While the approach of using energy as a political tool may seem successful in short time, it has been considered as very risky for long term period.

This study seeks to find out the major determinants and trends of Turkey’s foreign oil and natural gas strategy. The central question that it aims to answer is “What are the main trends and the principal determinants of Turkey’s foreign oil and natural gas strategy?” The study concludes that there are five major determinative elements of the strategy, namely Turkey’s concerns over the energy security; its aspiration of becoming an energy hub; some regional developments; business and trade partnerships between Turkey and its (potential) energy partners; and the foreign ambitions of Turkish energy firms. The concerns over the energy security are the most vital determinant, while the goal of becoming an energy hub is also a highly significant determinative element. With regards to the tendency of the strategy, the study has a number of important findings. First of all, Turkey’s power in bilateral (energy) relations is an inverse function of its energy dependence on its energy partners. That is, the more Turkey is reliant on the energy partners, the less power it has in the relations with them. Besides, the extent of its power in the energy relations importantly determines the room for manoeuvre in the Turkish foreign policy. Moreover, when Turkey is highly dependent on its energy partners and there are clashes between its energy considerations and foreign policy interests due to conflicts with the partners, then the former prevail over the latter and the country has to favour the energy cooperation instead of dispute with the partners. In addition, the more Ankara is reliant on the partners, the less benefits it can obtain from the energy cooperation. Hence, it is in the interest of the country to establish equalled energy partnerships with its energy allies to the extent possible. Lastly, Turkey occasionally uses its energy collaboration as an instrument in order to prevent the worsening of its relations with its key energy allies because its economic interests generally dominate its foreign policy considerations in such cases. The existing academic studies have analysed Turkey’s energy policy by covering only a few topics and rarely analysed Turkey’s energy strategy through applying IR theories. On the contrary, this study examines Turkey’s foreign oil and natural gas strategy by covering various related matters, countries, regions, organizations and actors based on a comprehensive theoretical framework composed of the paradigms of Realism and Liberalism. This is intended to be one of the most prominent contributions of this study to the literature on Turkey’s energy strategy.

Given the strategic geopolitical position of Turkey, the country has a crucial
role to play in diversifying energy resources and routes for oil and gas from
neighbouring countries to the EU. Furthermore, Turkey’s importance in the EU’s
quests to ensure secure access to energy resources has been significantly increasing,
particularly after the last crisis between Russia and Ukraine. However, while
Turkey’s this role is mutually beneficial for both sides, it is not the only determinant of
Ankara-Brussels energy cooperation, considering that there are several internal and
external factors that affect this cooperation. Thus, through addressing the question of
“What are the trends and determinants of the energy cooperation between Turkey and
the EU?”, this paper aims at providing the tendency and determining factors of this
collaboration. The paper will explore motivations behind Turkey-EU energy
cooperation and obstacles preventing to achieve full-fledged energy
collaboration. Moreover, the paper will cover some initiatives seeking to overcome these
obstacles and provide some recommendations for further optimizing the energy
collaboration.

A number of academic studies have covered Turkey’s energy relations with Kazakhstan,
overwhelmingly in the context of Turkey’s energy cooperation with Caspian Sea or Central Asian countries.
But, since there is a great potential of energy collaboration between Ankara and Astana, this collaboration
deserves to be analysed exclusively. Hence, by covering the energy partnership between Turkey and
Kazakhstan, this study attempts to fill in this significant gap in the academic literature on Turkish-Kazakh
energy ties. In addition, the existing studies have rarely applied IR theories to describe these ties. Through
explaining Ankara’s energy cooperation with Astana in the framework of Realism and Liberalism, this
paper seeks to fill in this gap. The analysis made in this context shows that Turkey’s energy security
concerns; its aspiration of becoming an energy hub; the economic and business partnerships established
between Turkey and Kazakhstan; the close political, historical and cultural links between the two countries;
and regional issues such as the aspiration of the EU to reduce its dependence on Russian gas and the
competition among Russia, Turkey, Iran, China and the EU control over the Caspian energy resources,
including those of Kazakhstan, are the main determinants of Turkey-Kazakhstan energy cooperation.

Turkey is currently one of the significant oil transit countries in the world. The country is also increasingly involved in gas pipeline projects and thereby boosts its importance in the gas transit. Turkish leaders strive for turning the country into an energy hub as becoming such a hub offers certain economic and geostrategic advantages. First of all, it would enable the country to diversify its oil and gas suppliers and as a result increase the security of its oil and gas supplies. It would also give the opportunity of using the transit role as leverage against involved parties to maximize Turkey’s national interests, expanding its importance in energy geopolitics and thereby contributing to its regional power. But, the country has not managed to become an energy hub due to a number of reasons, including the instability in its region, its increasing energy demand, the lack of necessary internal energy infrastructure, insufficient liberalization in the Turkish energy sector and the failure of the implementation of considerable number of cross-border pipeline projects. Through scrutinizing Turkey’s role and potential as an energy hub in the framework of Realism and Liberalism, this paper aims at providing a comprehensive and framed explanation of Turkey’s role in the energy transit.

This paper has the goal of contributing to the academic literature on Turkey's energy strategy in two ways. Firstly, through explaining the role of and interaction between the most important determinants of Turkey's foreign oil and natural gas strategy, the paper aims at contributing to further understanding of the strategy. Secondly, while a number of academic studies have analyzed Ankara's energy policy, they have remained mostly policy-based. Thus, by describing the key determinative elements of Ankara's external oil and natural gas strategy in the framework of Realism and Liberalism, the paper also aims to fill in this important gap in the academic literature. As shown in this article, both theories are rather helpful in explaining the principal determinants of Turkey's foreign oil and natural gas strategy. The paper argues that the most crucial determinative elements of the strategy, in terms of the order of their importance, are the concerns of the country over its energy security, its goal of becoming an energy hub, several regional developments, the economic and business partnerships between Turkey and its energy allies, and foreign ambitions of Turkish energy firms.

Although it is widely accepted that the study of diplomatic negotiations ought to be a multi-disciplinary enterprise, the field’s state of the art does not reflect this need for diversity. Game-theoretical and socio-psychological analyses make up the lion’s share of the research. In contrast, interactions between negotiators, perhaps the most
elementary building blocks of negotiations, have received relatively little scholarly attention. This paper inquires how matters of language, communication and discourse can be brought to the front in the study of diplomatic negotiations. It will address this question on a theoretical level, by asking what theoretical preconditions to a discursive and language-based approach to diplomatic negotiations exist, and on an empirical level, by developing a relevant case study demonstrating the potential of this approach. With regards to the first question, it will be argued that Discourse Theory is well-suited to overcome the obstacles that have prevented a focus on communication from taking root so far. The case study will be drawn from the European Neighbourhood Policy and look at the discursive conceptualization of institutional relations, bureaucratic infrastructure and socialization efforts in the EURONEST Parliamentary Assembly.

Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (DT) is enjoying increasing recognition for its potential to contribute to the study of institutional change and continuity. Yet the most fruitful approach to realizing this potential has hitherto not been found. The main proposition so far has been to operationalize DT's insights and concepts by adopting them into the framework of Discursive Institutionalism (DI). However, an ongoing debate about the compatibility of the ontologies underlying DT and DI has cast doubts over whether such a combination is theoretically feasible. The critical literature review in the first part of this article indeed finds insurmountable ontological differences between the discourse-theoretical and the discursive-institutionalist traditions, as their clashing notions of what is understood as a 'discourse' result in diverging views on power, agency, and subjectivity. Instead of merging DT into DI, I suggest to empower the former as a self-sufficient paradigm for institutional analysis. To achieve this, the second part of this article re-articulates the 'logics framework' proposed by Glynos an Howarth (2007) into a middle-range theory for the study of institutionalization and politicization in a discourse-theoretical fashion. The purpose of this re-articulation is to dispel various arguments against the viability of an autonomous poststructuralist approach to institutions.

This paper presents the first findings of ongoing research documenting the changing modalities of governing and organizing the built environment in the past two decades in Lebanon, a phase widely associated with the advent of neoliberalism in the country. Taking building permits as the entry point for an investigation of these modalities, our research shows that in line with trends documented elsewhere, the neoliberal turn has materialized in public interventions deployed at several levels in order to facilitate the circulation of capital to this sector and foster more intensive construction practices. These include changing regulations, delegating planning to private actors, and changing the institutional environment in ways that accommodate the needs of capital. We further argue that additional flexibility is provided to capital through the informalization of public decision-making with regard to planning decisions, meaning more decisions taken by mutual agreement, on an ad hoc basis, at multiple levels of the public hierarchies. Our findings are based on a thorough investigation of the public regulations issued over the past two decades as well as interviews with public sector officials, with developers, and with real estate experts.