Description
In 2011, Somalia’s extreme drought and subsequent famine invoked a humanitarian response from Turkey which has since evolved into a comprehensive Turkey-Somalia nation-building partnership. In the existing literature, this partnership is assessed based on economic opportunity, religious and cultural affinity and strategic geopolitical interests, however, up until now, questions regarding the role of subjectivity, anxiety and identity have been largely missing from the debate. To address this gap, this article investigates Turkey’s Somalia policy from a Lacanian ontological security perspective, introducing the argument that Somalia presents an opportunity for Turkey’s reputational fantasies of benevolence to manifest whilst controlling geopolitical anxieties. This article contributes to ontological security studies by looking beyond state narratives to TRT World as a site of subject production. By conducting critical discourse analysis and visual content analysis on articles and videos published from February 2016 to date, this research reveals that TRT World is producing Turkey as an ‘Afro-Eurasian’ state with reputational fantasies of benevolence, grounded in notions of brotherhood with no colonial baggage and a first-mover geopolitical advantage.
Keywords: Lacan, Ontological Security, Fantasy, Anxieties, Visual Geopolitics, Turkey
