Description
Turkey’s regional foreign policy is increasingly focusing on countering the Kurdish groups that are seen as threats to national security. At the same time, China has expanded its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to regional countries where Kurdish people live. As both Turkey and China are interested in fostering their bilateral cooperation within the BRI in a region where Kurdish people are a large ethnic group, their approaches about the Kurdish societies in the region are highly relevant. In this paper, we therefore focus on the implications of Turkey-China relationship for the Kurdish people in the region. We show that although both Turkish and Chinese policymakers referred to securitised framings of Kurdish people and energy in the region, they did so through different ways: Whilst Turkish policymakers are securitising the Kurdish presence on a political and military vision, their Chinese counterparts is focusing on geoeconomic interests to develop the BRI in the Eastern Mediterranean. Despite these differences, Turkish and Chinese officials’ (de)securitisation practices are closely linked to (re)negotiations of authority in the region. This link is made possible in the context of complexities of (de)legitimisation, (in)security and material dimensions such as economy and energy in the Eastern Mediterranean.
