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#Thread : Turkey Called the West Colonial. Now Scholars Say Ankara Reproduces the Same Playbook.
In 2021, I warned at the @MiddleEastInst that Turkey’s Somalia model was evolving from humanitarianism into a development trap; economic capture, security entrenchment, institutional bypassing, and an exportable model for Africa.
Five years later, the new 2026 Springer Nature study, “Geopolitical imaginations and construction of ‘the people’: Turkey’s populist spatial logic in its engagement with Africa,” cites that work and delivers a devastating contradiction: Turkey’s anti-colonial narrative “reproduces the very Orientalist imaginaries” it claims to oppose, while its geopolitical objectives may be “imperial, revisionist, strategic or security-driven.”
The irony is hard to miss: Ankara built legitimacy in Africa by condemning Western colonialism and racism, only to reproduce many of the same hierarchical structures under a different vocabulary-brotherhood, humanitarianism and solidarity.
This latest paper adds another layer to a growing body of research from major universities, defense institutions and peer-reviewed journals that has cited my 2021 analysis and independently reached similar conclusions about Turkey’s expanding political, economic and security footprint in Somalia and across Africa.
Somalia was the test case. Africa was the expansion plan.