Security Culture and Turkish Foreign Policy

This article examines the effects of security culture on the formation of Turkey's foreign policy interests and behaviors. Here security culture is assumed to offer a context in which decision makers interpret various independent variables that shape their foreign policy preferences and actions. In the literature on security culture there exist three different ways as to how to conceptualize security culture. One is to treat security culture as an independent variable. Here the goal is to shed light on the impact of security culture on foreign policy interests and behaviors in an objective manner. The second is to treat security culture as a dependent variable. Here the goal is to account for the formation of security culture in reference to various constitutive factors. The third is to treat security culture as a context through which decision makers try to make sense of various independent variables in the formation of their foreign policy preferences and behaviors. Against this background, this article tries to account for the impact of security culture on Turkish foreign policy in different time periods.