ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Turkey's relationship to postcoloniality and reviews the historical background in order to explain why the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has come to increasingly rely on postcolonial concepts to justify its policies. It focuses on academic knowledge production in Turkey and how the postcolonial critique of Western norms has recently manifested itself in troubling ways in the Turkish foreign policy analysis literature: i.e., directly influencing and enabling various neocolonial strategies adopted by the AKP government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Historically, the basis for the contemporary claims in Turkey to 'postcoloniality' are not straightforward. Not only was Turkey never colonized by European powers, it is the heir to an empire. The manner in which first the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey was socialised into the international system inscribed within Turkish society a sense of ambivalence towards the idea of 'Europe'. In 2014, the first postcolonial research centre in Turkey was established.
