Radical Salafi Movements and Terrorist Organizations: Conceptual and Theoretical Framework Hilmi Demir / Evaluation Note

Turkey is a country invested with the means and capacity to understand current events, to interpret them, to create solutions and develop a strategy. Yet there seems to be an incongruent lack of depth in academic circles regarding a theoretical framework and field work on the subject of radicalization. Research in Turkey often fails to go any further than reiterating concepts produced in the West such as “jihadist” or “Salafi”.

However, we will be unable to create our own solutions without developing objective, generally accepted and valid theories about how we describe and explain events and without defining our very own concepts, which will in turn indicate the way we interpret them.

Turkey erroneously deals with religious organizations and events related with religion without a defined framework and a geopolitical projection. In the absence of such projection that should determine your strategy as to how to interpret the course of events in the region, as well as your strategic management and guidance under those particular circumstances, it would be possible neither to become a great power, nor exert any influence in the region. In other words, you cannot manage events and violence sparked by religion without a geopolitical projection based on religion. For those asking “What does Religious Geopolitics mean?” I would like to share my own definition on the subject. Religious Geopolitics is the following: “The definition and construction of a context resulting from the analysis of the religious structures present in a particular region of a state or at a global scale, their ideology, their network and the different groups, with an aim to solve conflicts, prevent threats or, by doing so, to develop cultural, political and economic cooperation”. Religious conflicts have become an integral part of strategies seeking to dominate certain regions, particularly during the present century. The ties between religious structures, organizations and communities with violence, the media and the internet networks are creating new spaces for domination. Thus, religious geopolitics guides us by giving precedence to analyses that help to understand religious structures in the context of new relationships and new generated spaces.