Young people ask ‘the' question

The purpose was to improve the quality of international relations studies in Turkey, to compare it with those of other countries and to ask ourselves where we stand in the academic world.

We launched a scholarly periodic publication, which is recognized now by international citation indexes. We started all this without any financial resources, without any particular political support and completely on a voluntary basis.

Last weekend, as part of the council's activities, we held the 8th Security Academy in Kartepe, not far from İstanbul.

The main objective of this reunion was to discuss new approaches, paradigms, practices and technologies on security matters. Academics made their presentations before a relatively young audience composed of Master's and Ph.D. students. Some of these international relations students are parliamentary advisers, some of them work for different ministers or security agencies. In other words, while we were talking about the theoretical aspects of the security issues, they shared with us their experiences from the field. No doubt this was a particularly fruitful meeting both for academics and students.

During a coffee break, a Ph.D. student approached me. He said he is working on US-Turkey relations, trying to do a discourse analysis. He intends to put together official declarations made by American and Turkish officials since 1990 and try and find out which concepts have been frequently used in them and what others have been neglected. It's been three years since he started his research and he has managed to get every single official declaration made by the Americans about Turkey. He said that American officials have been extremely helpful in guiding him.

His problem is with the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The ministry didn't give him any documents, apparently because of their traditionally extreme caution. It seems that their Cold War reflexes are still intact, as they were quite suspicious of the student's request to access official documents: Why does he need those documents, what is he going to do with that information, will he share them with anybody, etc. Another problem is that many speech documents are nowhere to be found in the ministry, as its archives are not well organized. In other words, our Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not capable of presenting a full list of speeches made by Turkish foreign ministers, prime ministers or presidents on Turkish-American relations.

Personally, I don't believe that these documents and speech transcripts are simply lost. I'm pretty sure they are kept somewhere in the archives. But one ought to organize them thematically to make them accessible. Moreover, every document about US-Turkey relations is probably not in the Foreign Ministry's archives, as many other institutions have their own archives.

The Ph.D. student I was talking to told me that he had contacted every imaginable official body to get these documents. After three years of work, he only has what he could find in newspaper collections, even though his first intention was to study non-edited declarations. It is not like he is looking for an original speech made 500 years ago by an Ottoman sultan, just official and public declarations from the last 25 years. However, nobody can find the original speeches, thus he has to use newspaper reports.

As experienced academics, we have always advised our students that while doing research, they must find original texts and not use newspapers, because you never know how newspapers have edited speech. Students reply to us, however, saying that this is not possible in Turkey, as they have no access to any official documents.

This is a perfect example of how things are done in our country.