Conclusion The New Turkey in the Balkans: An Ambiguous Actor?

Drawing on over two years of fieldwork and more than 120 semi-structured elite interviews in Turkey and the Balkans, this book seeks to illuminate a neglected aspect of Turkey’s relations with its Balkan neighbours, in the context of the broader shift in Turkish domestic and foreign policy under the AKP from a realist-secular orientation to an ambiguous coercive Sunni Islamic one. It explains the complex relations between religion (Islam) and state identity, and their reflection in state power. In order to analyse how these concepts have been utilized and how they been received locally, this book uses as primary sources both Turkish and local actors in the three country cases: Republic of Bulgaria, Republic of North Macedonia and Republic of Albania. This part summaries all of these points