Forum on Southeast Europe • Erdogan’s Turkey in the Balkans: A Rival of the West?

Since the early 1990s, Turkey has been intimately involved in the politics of the Balkans. From Bosnia to Bulgaria and from Greece to Montenegro, it has seen its economic footprint as well as ties to local Muslim communities grow. Turkey has championed the inclusion of the Balkans into Western institutions, such as NATO, and contributed to regional cooperation and stability. At the same time, skeptics argue that the illiberal regime established by President Tayyip Erdoğan poses a political and ideological threat to struggling democracies of the region as well as to the EU’s policy of enlargement promoting accountability, human rights, and the rule of law.

The panel convened by the Forum on Southeast Europe brings together leading experts to explore Turkey’s security, economic, and cultural ties to the countries of the region as well as its competition for influence in relation to the EU and Russia.

Participants: Lisel Hintz (Johns Hopkins University); Nora Fisher Onar (Coastal Carolina University); Dimitar Bechev (CSEEES Fellow), and Erdağ Göknar (Duke University).

This event is presented by the Forum on Southeast Europe with support from the UNC Center for Global Initiatives and the UNC Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies.

Lisel Hintz is an assistant professor of International Relations and European Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. She is the author of Identity Politics Inside Out: National Identity Contestation and Foreign Policy in Turkey (Oxford UP, 2018). 
 
 
Nora Fisher Onar is an assistant professor of Global Politics at Coastal Carolina University, and research associate at the Centre for International Studies (CIS) at the University of Oxford. She is a co-editor of Istanbul: Living with Difference in a Global City (Rutgers UP, 2018).
 
 
Dimitar Bechev is a CSEEES fellow researching foreign policies of hybrid regimes, specifically in Russia and Turkey. He is the author of Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe (Yale UP, 2017).
 
 
 
Erdağ Göknar (moderator) is an associate professor of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University and director of the Duke University Middle East Studies Center.
 
 

This event is free and open to the public • Free parking is available after 5 PM at the GEC/McCauley parking deck and Beard surface lot (both on Pharmacy Lane); for more parking options, please see here.