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Over the last two decades, summits have gained great importance in developing relations with African countries and they have become useful tools to understand intersecting roadmaps on the continent. China, India, Japan, the United States, European countries and Russia conducted various summits and business forums targeting to develop their political, economic and military relations with Africa. In this vein, FOCAC (Forum on China–Africa Cooperation), European Union–Africa Business and Investment Summits, Japan's Africa Development Summits and Russia–Africa Summit provide some details of these powers' Africa policy. Turkey has also emerged as a new actor and summit organizer in Africa since it opened a new page for Africa in its foreign policy in 2005. After being a strategic partner to the African Union in 2008, Turkey has conducted three Turkey–Africa summits, Istanbul (2008), Malabo (2014) and Istanbul (2021), to form its roadmap in Africa. This work aims to analyse the role of Africa–Turkey summits in the development of Turkey's Africa policy and its relationship with African countries. The paper looks at all declarations comprehensively to evaluate Turkey's foreign policy discourse on Africa. Moreover, it examines Turkey's Africa policy implementations and achievements on the continent through the lens of summits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically investigates the impact of Turkey's embassies on trade with sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It uses a panel data set that covers 28 African countries for the period of 2002 to 2020 in order to measure if the opening of an embassy increases Turkey's exports to relevant countries. The study found a positive relationship between exports and diplomatic representation via embassies. More precisely, the empirical results indicate that the presence of an embassy in an African country increases Turkey's exports to this country by 108%. The study also found that the presence of business councils has the same positive effect on Turkey's export performance albeit at a moderate level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, particularly since 2002, relations between Iran and Turkey have been on the rise and generally expanding. The aim of this paper is to analyse and clarify the reasons for the sustainability of the two countries' relations while undergoing intermittent eruptions of disputes over the years. In other words, the main question is: why have Iran and Turkey, with their political frictions, routinely embraced rapprochement and collaboration in recent decades? Accordingly, the hypothesis proposed is that a key reason for the ongoing cooperation between Tehran and Ankara in different fields, is the rationale of geopolitical complementarity engendering their security needs in broad meaning, particularly energy security and natural gas. Whilst the logic also applies to water security, both states attach greater importance to border security and energy. In short, their common geopolitical destiny over-rides individual state preferences. To examine this hypothesis, Barry Buzan's theory based on a broad definition of security as well as regional security complex has been deployed through descriptive analytics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]