Notes from NOREF and İhsan Doğramacı Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research: Summary and Reflections on the Turkish and Norwegian Approaches to the Arab Spring and Peacebuilding

All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace

All Azimuth, journal of the İhsan Doğramacı Peace Foundation’s Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. It provides a forum for academic studies on foreign policy analysis and peace research as well as theoretically-oriented policy pieces on international issues.

It particularly welcomes research on the nexus of peace, security and development. It aims to publish pieces bridging the theory-practice gap; dealing with under-represented conceptual approaches in the field; and making scholarly engagements for the dialogue between the 'centre' and the 'periphery'. We strongly encourage, therefore, publications with homegrown theoretical and philosophical approaches. In this sense, All Azimuth aims to transcend the conventional theoretical, methodological, geographical, academic and cultural boundaries. All Azimuth is published two times a year by the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research.The Arab uprisings and the transition processes following the regime changes in these countries have occupied the foreign policy agendas of Turkey and Norway during the last two years, even though these events affected the two nations in varying degrees and ways.

Turkey, as a direct or regional neighbour of these Arab countries, has been experiencing this process more directly and has been greatly affected economically, socially, and politically, especially from the influx of almost 200.000 refugees. Norway, on the other hand, which has been experiencing this process rather indirectly and from a greater distance, has still been impacted in a variety of ways.

Regardless of the magnitude of the tremors felt by Turkey and Norway, both countries desire to act upon the developments in a constructive manner and be constructive forces to help this transition. A Turkey-Norway collaboration may sound like an unusual partnership, but a common agenda for peacebuilding and conflict resolution led two organizations, the Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Center (NOREF) and the İhsan Doğramacı Peace Foundation’s Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research at Bilkent University in Ankara, to explore the potential of this partnership in relation to the Arab uprisings.

The two groups collaborated in a workshop held with Turkish and Norwegian academics under the co-sponsorship of the Strategic Research Center (SAM) of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 1 and 2 November 2012 in Ankara. The workshop focused on the Arab uprisings from a peacebuilding and conflict resolution perspective. Presenting the views anonymously, this article summarizes and reflects on some of the discussions held during the workshop.

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