Based on the media materials, academic literature sources and other documentation, as well as interviews, the project examined the diverse perspectives on the positioning of Turkey in the post-Yugoslav region: as a donor, positive political and cultural actor, “protector state,” or a “foreign threat.”
It involved the following Research Actions:
1. By investigating primary sources, such as those of the Turkish State Directorate for Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği, abbreviated as Diyanet), the policies of Turkish aid to Bosnia Herzegovina in the sphere of religious development, i.e. its donations to and cooperation with Bosnian Muslim religious institutions were analyzed. The second set of primary sources pertained to the documents of Turkish governmental aid agencies and charities (primarily TIKA and Yunus Emre), which provide funding for higher education, and for the rebuilding of the Ottoman-era monuments.
2. Fieldwork in Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina. While the fieldwork was supposed to take place in the end of the first year of the project, it was impossible due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemics and the closing down of the borders in Belgium and Turkey. Hence, partial results were achieved relying on the online communication. In the long report I elaborate on the problems I encountered in the effort to conduct online interviews with officials in Turkish governmental aid agencies, NGOs and charity foundations’ workers, as well as with faculty and students of Turkish-funded universities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and religious functionaries.
3. The task leading to the conclusion of the project is to do a critical analysis of the operationalization of the concept of Neo-Ottomanism in the global, and, more specifically, wider European context, in relation to the uses of Neo-Ottomanism in the post-Yugoslav space. Here, the aim is to focus on the media and political discourse in the European Union that carry anti-Turkish stances and anti-Muslim (Islamophobic) attitudes vis-à-vis the refugee (“migrant”) crises since 2014.
4. This research action, as part of the project’s conclusions, was intended to criticize, based on my findings, the use of Neo-Ottomanism as a discursive assessment of the role and interests of Turkey in the Balkans.
Dissemination of the results was severely impacted by the outbreak of the pandemics. While six conferences and workshops that I was scheduled to take part in in 2020 and 2021 were cancelled, only two were, instead, realized online (I present them in detail in the long report).
Since I experienced serious setbacks with the planned fieldwork, and had to cancel my live interviews in Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina, I had to rethink some of the project foci in 2020-2021. Since then, I focused on more generally relevant and comparative issues, such as the problems of reception of international assistance in the post-conflict space, gender aspects of the neoconservative politics, and the problems of social inequality associated with the neoliberal trends in the postsocialist regions.
The dissemination of research findings and their comparative and theoretical aspects, which took place at a number of venues (before the pandemics) are presented in detail in the attached report.
