Before undertaking my PhD, I was working as a Research Assistant at Antalya Bilim University. My decision to study at Loughborough was swayed by the research quality, the PhD funding and the friendly supervisors. I researched Loughborough online and I emailed my potential supervisors. The director of the PhD programme was also very helpful in making my decision.
My PhD project is based around a consensus in the literature of EU-Turkey relations that Turkey has been an 'unusual' candidate. This atypicality is related to the problematic Europeanization of the country, political polarization (after 2007), populism (after 2010) and the rise of authoritarianism under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, previously AKP) rule (especially after 2015). Based on this assumption, the literature suggests that the leader of AKP is the main decision-maker of Turkey's foreign policy.
This research aims to test this assumption in order to explain the changes in Turkey's foreign policy towards the EU from 2002 until 2019. The added value of the research will be the examination of the interactions between Erdogan's transformational leadership, AKP-dominated domestic politics, and international dynamics. All these factors contributed to the changes in Turkish foreign policy towards the EU in this timespan.