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Editors’ introduction: Special issue on Turkish foreign policy

The origins of this special issue go back to a series of panels entitled "Turkish Foreign Policy in the 21st Century: Internal and External Challenges and Future Prospects," organized by the International Relations Council of Turkey for the 7th International Relations Conference of Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Two common themes emerged from these panels. The first theme was centered on a discussion of the conspicuous transformation that Turkish foreign policy has undergone in recent years. In contrast to most of the 1990s, Turkish foreign policy in the first decade of the twenty-first century has become increasingly cooperative with and conciliatory towards its neighborhood. This is a trend that started roughly in the late 1990s and was characterized first by a rapprochement with Greece, followed by a similar process with Syria. The peak of this transformation was probably the dramatic turnabout and overhaul of Turkey's Cyprus policy in early 2004. Turkey's foreign policy towards the Kurds of Iraq, on the one hand, and Armenia, on the other, was showing early signs of potential reform, when the panels were taking place in June of 2008. The visit of the Turkish President Abdullah Gill to Yerevan in September of 2008 and to Iraq in March of 2009 were steps towards actualization of these signs and represented how far this transformation of Turkish foreign policy would go. The second theme centered on the actual study of Turkish foreign policy. Panelist highlighted that, in parallel to the transformation of the substance of Turkish foreign policy, there was also a marked change