The Copenhagen School in US-­Turkey relations : the 'War on Terror' in Northern Iraq

Abstract

If the majority of Iraq has become a quagmire for Washington, the stable and prosperous North has become a regional problem, especially for Turkey-US relations. Turkey sees the possibility of an independent Kurdish region as a threat to its own territorial integrity and a haven for the PKK militants. The US sees Northern Iraq as the only island of stability in a chaotic context, and the Kurds as their main allies in the country. As both Ankara and Washington assess Northern Iraq within a regional security context it seems appropriate to make use of the Copenhagen School’s Regional Security Complex Theory, which underlines the importance of the regional level in security analysis, as well as of its Securitisation theory, which highlights the discourse component in the definition of security threats. With these theories as a background, this paper will focus on the discourses from both Turkey and the United States in order to see how the two securitising processes regarding Northern Iraq developed, how they interplayed and how they were influenced by the regional factor. Due to space and time constrains, the analyses will be limited to a 12-month period (April 2006-2007).