Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Turkey in Eurasia: Endeavors and Encounters, Taylor & Francis Ltd, ss.164-181, 2026
In the discussions on the Internationalization of Higher Education (IHE), it can be argued that Turkey has deviated from the center and exhibits the characteristics of peripheral countries. Despite this fact, its historical, cultural, and geographical characteristics, on the one hand, and its relatively long experience with a democratic political order, an open economic system, and a higher education system aligned with Anglo-Saxon tradition, make Turkey a regional hub for students from the Balkans, the Middle East, and, naturally, from Central Asia. However, unlike the traditional destinations for international students, the political rationale behind Turkey’ s IHE has always been more prominent than the economic rationale. Turkey’ s IHE has consistently exhibited a symbiotic relationship with its foreign policy, with IHE policy and practices going hand-in-hand with the country’ s foreign policy. The Great Student Project (GSP), launched after the collapse of the Soviet Union for students from Central Asian Turkish republics and other Turkic communities in the Russian Federation, was motivated by these soft power ambitions. However, the administrative and academic problems in the implementation of the GSP, along with political issues that have arisen over several years, have prevented Turkey from fully realizing its soft power ideals through IHE. Among these problems are Turkey’ s perception of the entire region as a homogeneous entity, the approach of treating all Turkish republics with the same tools, sharing soft power roles with non-state actors until 2016, limited resourcefulness of the country to respond to the expectations of the region and the secondment of the region after evolving the GSP into Trkiye Scholarships in 2012. We argue that Turkey’ s IHE has lost its appeal in the region, especially with the emergence of dynamic competitors.