4. Turkey’s International Cooperation Perspective: A Framework

Along with its notable economic growth and extended foreign policy in the 2000s during AK Party governments, Turkey expanded the scope of its international cooperation and reached out to a number of countries. In this period, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s support as a state leader for international assistance activities broke new ground in the reorganization of relevant public institutions in the country. The triangle of TİKA-AFAD-Kızılay, which has also been backed by NGOs, has enabled Turkey to reach out to people in hardship from the Philippines to Pakistan and from Palestine to Arakan. The generosity of the country toward the Syrian people serves as the most striking example in that regard, highlighting Turkey’s adoption of the humanitarian imperative. Within this period, Turkey also significantly increased its contributions to the development stories of many partner countries. As a result of these efforts, Turkey’s position as a leading actor in development cooperation markedly increased within the international community. OECD burden sharing indicators for 2018 reveal that Turkey, as an upper-middle-income country, recorded the highest ratio of official development assistance to national income, within the OECD league. In light of these salient facts, the main pillars of the Turkish cooperation perspective are discussed in this chapter with details.