A constructivist approach to popular culture and foreign policy : the case of Turkey and 'Valley of Wolves: Ambush'

• Main Author: Yukaruc, Umut
• Published: University of East Anglia 2017
• Subjects: 327.561
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.725815

In this thesis, I argue that, as a popular text, Valley of the Wolves: Ambush functions as a site for consent production for foreign policies formed by the AKP elites within the last decade, through a process of reproduction of state identities, ideologies, and discourses at the level of narrative. This thesis positions its argument in two fields: Turkish Foreign Policy (TFP) studies and Popular Culture and World Politics (PCWP) within the larger International Relations (IR) context. It is interdisciplinary in nature as it also make use of theories around popular culture. Although scholarship within IR theory and PCWP has done much to explore issues around representations of politics in popular media (Weldes, 1999a; Nexon and Neumann, 2006; Van Veeren, 2009; Kiersey and Neumann, 2013), this has frequently focused on Western examples and narratives such as 24, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Harry Potter, and so on. In this regard this thesis advances these theories by focusing on a particular national context and offer an original analysis on Turkey. While doing so, it employs discourse analysis. It also teases out some of the complexities of the nature and implications of representation of the TFP by using critical reception. Thisis because thisthesisregards critical debates around the television series as tools to explore discourses around consent production. Together with an analysis of the critical reception of the television series, political discourses around foreign policy are examined in line with the ways in which these policies are depicted and reproduced by the series. This leads to an intertextual reading of Turkish state identity and security imaginary and a critical examination of the TFP in the last decade from a constructivist perspective.