Turkey's Foreign Policy Approach in Caucasus (Case Study Republic of Azerbaijan)

With the decline of the Kemalist discourse and the victory of the Islamists, Turkey’s foreign policy has undergone fundamental changes. Contrary to the past, Ankara's ambitions does not consider Turkey as a bridge between East and West, but a central country among strategic areas such as the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The Neo-Ottomanism doctrine of the AKP seeks to expand Turkish influence in the periphery and integrate it with those societies under the goal of gaining global strategic importance for Turkey. Despite the failure of Ankara's integrationist approach in some geographic areas such as the Middle East, the main question of the paper implies the factors that have contributed to the success of Turkey's peripheral approach toward the Republic of Azerbaijan. It seems that ethnic and cultural ties, strong economic relations especially in the field of energy and the geopolitical weight of the Republic of Azerbaijan in the geopolitical competitions of Turkey and Russia have facilitated the cooperation of Turkey with the Republic of Azerbaijan.
The main purpose of this article is to examine the foreign policy of the Justice and Development party in the Caucasus and in relation to the Republic of Azerbaijan. In this paper, attempts are made to analyze the reasons for the success of Turkey's peripheral approach toward the Republic of Azerbaijan in a descriptive and analytical way and using the convergence theoretical framework