Italy and Turkey in the Mediterranean: challenges and opportunities for cooperation

Abstract

Being major actors in the Mediterranean, Italy and Turkey enjoy a long-standing and healthy partnership. In the last decade, their relations have been shaped by their growing engagement in the fickle dynamics of the Mediterranean region, a geopolitical hotspot of escalating regional and international tensions. In particular, Rome and Ankara have been playing crucial roles in the increasingly entangled questions of Libyan troublesome stabilization and Eastern Mediterranean gas bonanza’s management. This thesis aims to analyse the development and the characteristics of the current Italo-Turkish relation in the light of their involvement in the Libyan and Eastern Mediterranean contexts. At the same time, this work investigates some ongoing trends in the Mediterranean in the attempt to identify the main domains on which the partnership between Italy and Turkey is likely to be shaped in the forthcoming future.