EMOFORTE (EMOtions in the FOReign Policy of Turkey towards the EU) aims to transform our current knowledge of the cultural, social and political conditions underlying the reversal of Turkish Foreign Policy in relation to Europe. It will address both the dominant and dissident foreign policy discourses of Turkish political elites (i.e. politicians, parliamentarians, party officials, and bureaucrats) in terms of emotions materialised in identity discourses and in the narratives about Europe. Emotion research in international relations is still in need of an interdisciplinary methodological model comprehensive enough to account for the emotions as a multi-level phenomenon with individual, social, cultural and international dimensions. EMOFORTE will develop an innovative interdisciplinary methodology drawing on post-structuralist discourse theory and the sociology of emotions for the interpretation of data, and benefiting from the toolkits offered by corpus linguistic and Big Data approaches to analysing text.
EMOFORTE will be conducted under the supervision of Dr. Ruth Breeze at the University of Navarra (Spain), with a secondment at Lund University (Sweden). At European level, EMOFORTE’s research objectives address the EU’s challenge for improving its external action and international cooperation in order to be a stronger global actor by expanding the current knowledge about political, ideological, cultural and psychological factors which drive increasing nationalism, populism, and authoritarianism in Turkey and about their impact on the cooperation between Turkey and the EU in the global and regional issues.
MSCA IF Project EMOFORTE has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, at framework under agreement Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant no.896311.