CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2026
| Author | Cetinkaya, Ceren |
|---|---|
| Title | Foreign Policy Behind the Scenes: Turkish Television Dramas and the Politics of Production and Circulation |
| Summary | In the past fifteen years, Turkish soap operas have achieved significant global success, coinciding with the rise of Ottoman-themed television series and the increasing political involvement of cultural workers in Turkey. This transformation in cultural production paralleled Turkey’s evolving foreign policy during the 2010s, as the country shifted from a primarily pro-European stance to positioning itself as a regional leader in the Middle East, a strategy often referred to as neo-Ottomanism. These concurrent developments highlight the intricate relationship among national identity, foreign policy, and cultural production in contemporary Turkey and internationally. This dissertation examines television series produced between 2011 and 2024 in relation to shifts in Turkish foreign policy, engaging core International Relations concepts such as national identity and foreign policy through the framework of cultural production and circulation. It analyzes on-screen representations in Ottoman-themed Turkish television series alongside the production processes that construct these narratives and traces the evolution of their broader political implications. The study demonstrates how Ottoman-themed narratives are politically received, negotiated, and contested in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, including through regulatory interventions and prohibitions. Rather than viewing popular culture solely as representational output or a simple instrument of soft power, the dissertation contends that cultural production and foreign policy are mutually constitutive. By analyzing production networks and everyday working dynamics, the study positions cultural producers as foreign policy actors and investigates the forms of agency they exercise in meaning-making practices. Drawing on insights from the Popular Culture and World Politics literature in International Relations alongside Media and Production Studies, the dissertation adopts a multidisciplinary approach and a qualitative research design. The analysis is based on relational interviews with cultural producers, combined with the analysis of visual and discursive materials from the television series they produce. By attending to representation level and everyday working practices, creative choices, and institutional constraints, the research explores how cultural producers reflect on their own positioning within broader political dynamics and how foreign policy narratives are negotiated throughout the production process. The contribution of this dissertation to the discipline of International Relations is threefold. Theoretically, it advances debates on Popular Culture and World Politics by adopting a practice-based, production-oriented approach and by conceptualizing cultural producers as foreign policy actors. It highlights the relational and contextual forms of agency cultural producers exercise in meaning-making practices related to national identity and foreign policy. Methodologically, the research design aligns with this framework by combining representational analysis with relational interviews that foreground producers’ everyday work and production networks in order to unpack agency, thereby advancing a practice-oriented, production-centered approach to the study of cultural production and foreign policy. Empirically, the dissertation contributes to the study of Turkish soap operas and foreign policy by moving beyond linear accounts of cultural diffusion and soft power. It instead reveals a politically conditioned, contested, and sometimes disrupted nature of transnational cultural circulation. |
| Supervisor | Strausz, Erzsebet |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2026/cetinkaya_ceren.pdf |
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