Turkey, Geopolitics, and the Age of Populist World-Making Remapping Regional Orders

Acknowledgments

PART I: POPULISM, SOVEREIGNTY, AND WORLD-MAKING

Chapter 1: Populism and the International Order

Chapter 2: From Populism to Populist World-Making

Chapter 3: Populism and the Rewriting of Sovereignty in Turkey

PART II: TURKEY AS A LABORATORY OF POPULIST GEOPOLITICS

Chapter 4: The Kurdish Question, Populist Sovereignty, and the Limits of Institutional Mediation

Chapter 5: Somalia: Where Presence Becomes Power

Chapter 6: Syria, Territorialization and Coercive World-Making

Chapter 7: Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean: Antagonism and Coexistence in a Fragmented Terrain

Chapter 8: Populism and the Remaking of Geopolitical Order

References

Biography

Spyros A. Sofos is Assistant Professor of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. His research explores the intersection of societal insecurity, identity and collective action and, to date, it has focused on Turkish politics and society, nationalism and populism in Europe and the Middle East, urban citizenship in the Middle East, European Muslim identities and politics, and the theory of populism. He has authored Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism (2022), coauthored   Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks (2013), and Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (2008), coedited Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (1996) and his work has been widely published in political sociology, political science and interdisciplinary journals

If you want to understand why the liberal international order is unraveling, stop looking only at great power rivalry, because Sofos makes a far more unsettling argument: that populism itself has become a geopolitical force, one that does not merely respond to the world but actively remakes it by exporting its domestic antagonisms outward and recoding sovereignty as a weapon against institutional mediation. Turkey under Erdoğan offers the richest possible case for developing this argument: a NATO member turned revisionist actor, a would-be regional power that has learned to turn humanitarian presence, military intervention, and maritime brinkmanship into instruments of the same political logic that governs it at home. The book's diagnosis travels well beyond Turkey, reaching into every context where populist governments have turned foreign policy into a theater of moral struggle. For anyone trying to understand why the international order is fracturing, this book is indispensable.

Evren Balta, Professor Comparative & International Politics, Özyeğin University, İstanbul

This meticulously researched book argues that the heart of populism resides in an idealised people whose will grants a single leader the moral authority to act in their name. Everything that mediates that key bond - parliaments, dissent, diplomacy etc. - must be swept aside. At the international level, this implies that personal ties between leaders of great powers, and not legally defined soveignty, becomes key. Turkey under Erdogan’s foreign policy fits this framework hand in glove.

Iver B. Neumann, Director, Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Norway, and author of Uses of the Other. The 'East' in European Identity Formation

Spyros Sofos’s Turkey, Geopolitics, and the Age of Populist World-Making is a bold, intellectually sophisticated, and genuinely original intervention that pushes the study of populism beyond its conventional domestic confines and into the heart of international order-making. What makes this book so compelling is not only its theoretical ambition, but its rare ability to connect the reworking of sovereignty, political community, and institutional mediation at home with the remapping of geopolitical space abroad. By treating Turkey not merely as a case but as a laboratory of populist geopolitics, Sofos offers a rich and deeply persuasive account of how populist political logic travels across scales and actively reshapes regional orders. This is a major contribution to debates on populism, Turkish politics, and international relations, and it will be indispensable reading for scholars seeking to understand how contemporary political forces do not simply navigate the world but seek to remake it.

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk, Associate Professor in International Relations and Politics, London Metropolitan University

In this book, Spyros Sofos builds on his earlier explorations of nationalism and the concept of “the people” in Turkey, and delivers a genuinely insightful take on populism in foreign policy. In Sofos’s understanding, populism is not merely a domestic ideology according to which national elites and establishment institutions stand in the way of the true will of the people, but a political logic with inevitable international connotations. Populism is a political logic that constructs moralized oppositions between supposedly authentic peoples and illegitimate international institutions and orders. The book delivers rich and interesting case studies of Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East and Africa, but it is nothing less than an interrogation of the manner in which populism is reshaping our world.

 Paul T. Levin, Director, Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS)