Popular Culture and Foreign Policy

This book argues that, as a popular text, the Turkish television series Valley of the Wolves: Ambush functions as a site for consent production for foreign policies formed by the AKP within the last decade, through a process of reproduction of state identities, ideologies, and discourses at the level of narrative. This book positions its argument in two fields: Turkish Foreign Policy (TFP) studies and Popular Culture and World Politics within the larger International Relations context. It is interdisciplinary in nature as it also makes use of theories around popular culture. It advances works within these fields by focusing on a particular national context and offer an original analysis on Turkey. While doing so, it employs discourse analysis. It also teases out some of the complexities of the nature and implications of representation of the TFP by using critical reception. Together with an analysis of the critical reception of the television series, political discourses around foreign policy is examined in line with the ways in which these policies are depicted and reproduced by the series. This leads to an intertextual reading of Turkish state identity and security imaginary and a critical examination of the TFP in the last decade from a Constructivist perspective.