Role Theory and Securitization: An Agency Based Framework for Decoding Turkey’s Diplomatic Offensive against Israel

Turkish foreign policy has recently undergone remarkable changes, and these changes have led to a considerable degree of foreign policy activism, most notably in the Middle East, which has never been seen throughout the history of the Turkish Republic. It is unquestionable that Turkey’s activism in the Middle East increased the country’s power in the Arab-Muslim political circles but also caused deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations. Although there has been a consensus on relating the changes in Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East with the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) leading echelons, to date only a few studies attempted to incorporate a particular theoretical approach to explain this agency based shift. This paper argues that role theory can be incorporated into the theory of securitization and it can be used as a conceptual tool for decoding Turkey’s strained relations with Israel.