[Chapter]Turkey-China Rapprochement: Turkey’s Reconstruction of Its Liminality? in Critical Readings of Turkey’s Foreign Policy

This chapter by utilizing liminality as a conceptual framework argues that Turkey’s journey toward Asia and particularly toward China is a recent example of the reproduction of its in-betweenness. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the literature on Turkey’s liminality by illustrating how Turkey has utilized its liminal position as a capital in establishing a close relationship with China. Moreover, it contributes to the existing knowledge on Turkey’s liminality, in contrast to previous work largely focusing on how the EU/West situated Turkey in a liminal position, by analyzing Turkey-China cooperation through the lenses of liminality. China and Turkey’s cooperation on the BRI has been utilized to demonstrate how China’s economic and political alternative normative frameworks inspired Turkey to realign its long-standing liminal positions to attract infrastructure investments from China. This book covers selected topics on contemporary Turkish Foreign Policy to understand and critically analyze the ideas, discourses, actors, processes and structures in the foreign policymaking. It provides the readers with a compilation of chapters on the critical analysis of Turkey’s changing positionality and foreign policy identity. In doing so, it draws on the tools and perspectives offered by the critical theories and approaches in International Relations and relevant disciplines. Most of the chapters included in this project deal with the dramatic metamorphoses that took place in Turkish Foreign Policy during the period when the Justice and Development Party ruled and their ongoing consequences.