Beyond the Soft–Hard Power Binary: Resource Control in Turkey’s Foreign Policy Towards Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Once depicted as a flagship case for the soft power—based foreign policy of young democracies, Turkey’s conduct of foreign affairs following its authoritarian backsliding has been increasingly associated with hard power. Using the case of Turkey’s Africa policy under the AKP, this article challenges this reading and its underlying conceptual assumptions. To overcome the spurious democracy—soft power vs. autocracy—hard power dichotomy, it argues for adopting a process-oriented approach to analysing the foreign policies of (autocratising) states by focusing on, firstly, the foreign policy situations in which they mobilize power resources to a particular end; and, secondly, the extent to which they attempt to gain control over societal power resources.