On April 13, 2017, the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research hosted a PeaceTalk: Young Scholar Series seminar at Bilkent University. Our guest speaker, İsmail Erkam Sula, PhD Candidate from Bilkent University International Relations Department, made a presentation entitled “Turkey’s Foreign Policy Roles and Events Dataset (TFPRED): Quantifying the parallelism between role conceptions and role performance”.
His study is based on a compound of two tools in the foreign policy analysis (FPA) literature: ‘Role Theory’ and ‘Event Data’. While combining these two tools, this study observes the parallelism between Turkish foreign policy (TFP) ‘words’ and ‘deeds’. The study focuses on a quantitative comparison of Turkey’s foreign policy role conceptions and practices directed at five surrounding regions (the Balkans, Southern Caucasus, Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Euro-Atlantic Region). For this purpose, the Mr. Sula designed and constructed the Turkey’s Foreign Policy Roles and Events Dataset (TFPRED), which combines qualitative and quantitative analysis and contains an extensive amount of data collected from news reports and the foreign policy speeches of Turkish decision makers. The TFPRED enables researchers to observe the dynamics of the relationship between TFP decision-makers’ vision (reflected in their speeches) and the actual conduct of Turkey’s foreign policy (foreign policy events). Such dynamics provide insights into how the foreign policy machinery works in Turkey, so as to contribute to the emergence of a theory of TFP.