Master Thesis Defense: Emre Yılmaz
An Attempt Of Conceptualizing The “Clash Of Regional
Powers”: Contradictory Leaderships Of Turks And Saudis In The
Arab Spring
Emre Yılmaz
European Studies, MA Thesis, 2015
Thesis Jury
Bülent Aras (Thesis Supervisor), Bahri Yılmaz, Şaban Kardaş, Mustafa Kutlay(Substitute Jury)
Date &Time: July,24th 2015 – 16:30
Place: FASS 2034
Abstract
Regional powers, their roles and places in the future configuration of new world order
have been burning debates in academia, thereby there has been paid attention more on their
role in regionalization and yet academic studies are insufficient of demonstrating their
projections in the responding regions. It is true that regional powers have been increasingly
gaining importance in their gradually being autonomous regions. Yet, in this responding
region there might be more than one regional power whose regional projections would be
possibly contradictory with each other due to their foreign policy considerations stemming
from various reasons. In this thesis, it is demonstrated that how two different foreign policy
oriented regional powers approach to crucially important unfolding regional developments
by taking into account Saudi Arabia and Turkey under the name of “clash of regional
power”. Thus, this thesis catches critical look at the illusion of regional powers having no
rival in their responding regions and provides concrete results aforementioned illusion is no
longer acceptable which makes this thesis important to show the intra-regional challengers of
regional powers.