The Kosovar Turks and Post-Kemalist Turkey: Foreign Policy, Socialisation and Resistance

Even before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Turkic communities, living in states newly independent from Ottoman rule, were ’protected’ by the Ottomans. With the creation of the new Turkish Republic, the notion of ’Outside Turks’ became embedded in a new foreign policy which aimed to unite these communities, with whom Kemalist Turkey claimed to share ethnic origin, to the homeland. After 1980, and particularly during the Justice and Development Party rule, the country’s domestic agenda, however, was transformed to imagine Outside Turks along cultural and religious lines, rather than in a purely ethnic sense.