Derya Göçer Akder

• Professor (Assistant) at Middle East Technical University

Regional integration changes domestic decision-making structures, relations among social forces, and power distribution in different ways. China influences Turkey’s domestic dynamics through involvement in economic cooperation, geostrategic alliances, and factional alliances. Concurrent and conflicting decision-making processes and foreign policy i...

This paper investigates Türkiye’s evolving relations with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a large-scale program of infrastructure investment and project financing proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The paper digs deeply into cases from two sectors—transportation and energy—focusing on how heightened and changing local expecta...

Iran has traditionally presented itself as a cusp state, manoeuvring between different regions. Recently, Iran is attempting to situate itself among the emerging connections between Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. There are also limitations to Iran’s cuspness, as domestic politics and geopolitical rivalries in the Middle East challenge the coun...

Regional integration changes domestic decision-making structures, relations among social forces, and power distribution in different ways. While the EU and ASEAN constitute two different models of institutional regionalization, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) offers a test case for a new form of informal regionalization. The official discour...

This paper will look at the lessons we can draw from recent uprisings in the Middle East with regard to the theories of revolutions. Within the wider theoretical debate of the causes, processes and outcomes of revolutions the paper will focus on the international political dimensions of the revolutionary situations as distinct from the revolutionar...