PLURIEX Dialogues is a flexible and outward-facing activity stream designed to connect PLURIEX with ongoing debates, projects, and communities beyond its core programme. Through collaborative panels, roundtables, public talks, and joint workshops, PLURIEX Dialogues brings together scholars, practitioners, students, and civil society actors to reflect on pressing questions of EU governance, knowledge production, and epistemic plurality. Rather than operating as standalone events, Dialogues are embedded in wider academic and policy ecosystems, allowing PLURIEX to remain responsive, relational, and open to emerging conversations.
By partnering with other research projects, international organisations, networks, and universities, PLURIEX Dialogues creates low-threshold spaces for experimentation, exchange, and mutual learning. These activities foreground dialogue over output-driven formats, encouraging critical reflection, interdisciplinary encounters, and the circulation of diverse knowledges. In doing so, PLURIEX Dialogues strengthens the project’s commitment to epistemic pluriversality while amplifying its visibility, reach, and collaborative impact across academic and policy communities.
Seminar Overview
This seminar explored Türkiye–Italy cooperation in defence and security as a critical entry point for understanding Europe’s evolving new security architecture beyond EU-centric and core-dominated perspectives. Rather than treating European security as a unified institutional project, the discussion examined how bilateral partnerships and middle-power strategies actively shape Europe’s defence landscape.
Adopting a pluriversal analytical lens, the seminar highlighted how European defence governance is co-produced across multiple geopolitical sites — including NATO, the EU, defence-industrial cooperation, bilateral cooperations and regional alliances. Türkiye–Italy relations were discussed as a case that challenges binary framings of EU vs. non-EU and core vs. periphery, revealing instead a polycentric and negotiated security order.
As PLURIEX, we were pleased to host a discussion aligned with our core mission of epistemic pluriversality: recognising multiple strategic rationalities, geopolitical experiences and knowledge sites in the study of Europe. The seminar provided an interdisciplinary space where Europe’s recent security challenges were analysed through relational, comparative and non-hierarchical perspectives.
About the Speaker
Riccardo Gasco is the Foreign Policy Program Coordinator at IstanPol Institute and a PhD Candidate in International Relations at the University of Bologna (Department of Political and Social Sciences). His doctoral research examines Türkiye’s foreign policy behaviour as a regional power navigating between NATO and Russia, drawing on neoclassical realism and Foreign Policy Analysis to analyse alliance strategies, strategic autonomy and balancing practices.
Based in Istanbul since 2019, he is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center (IPC) and has previously held a visiting fellowship at Sabancı University. His research interests include alliance politics, middle-power behaviour, Turkish–Russian relations, transatlantic security and the transformation of the international order in a multipolar era. Methodologically, he employs process tracing, discourse analysis and elite interviews.
In addition to academic research, Riccardo regularly contributes policy analysis and commentary to Turkish, Italian and international media on European security, Turkish foreign policy and Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Key Discussion Points
During the seminar, participants discussed how Türkiye–Italy defence cooperation reflects broader shifts toward strategic autonomy, flexible alliances and defence-industrial partnerships in Europe. The discussion underscored how middle powers exercise agency within overlapping security architectures, complicating conventional EU-centred narratives. In addition, the challenges of Turkiye’s exclusion from the SAFE programme were discussed and how it may contribute to new European security architecture were evaluated as well.
The seminar concluded with an engaged Q&A session focusing on the implications of pluriversality for studying European defence, alliance politics and the future of European security governance.
Audience & Discussion
The seminar brought together a highly diverse audience, including:
This diversity enabled a genuinely interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral exchange, reflecting PLURIEX’s commitment to connecting academic knowledge, policy practice, and student learning. The Q&A session addressed issues such as defence industrial cooperation, the recent regional and global challenges in Europe’s security and defence, EU–NATO relations, and the implications of strategic autonomy for Europe’s peripheries.
The 60th anniversary meeting of the Economic Development Foundation (İktisadi Kalkınma Vakfı – IKV), titled “Türkiye–EU Relations: The Way Forward and the Role of IKV”, convened a broad and highly engaged community of academics, civil society representatives, policy practitioners, and think-tank experts working on Türkiye–EU relations. The meeting served as an important space for dialogue at a moment when Türkiye–EU relations continue to be shaped by overlapping political, economic, and security dynamics and by debates over the EU’s evolving institutional and policy architecture.
Across the sessions, participants reflected on both the structural challenges facing Türkiye–EU relations and the possibilities for renewed engagement. Discussions addressed the roles of civil society and policy institutes in sustaining dialogue and expertise, as well as the need for stronger cooperation between knowledge-producing communities and policy actors. A recurring theme was the value of people-to-people contacts and bringing together different sectors—academia, civil society, and the policy community—to ensure that debates on Türkiye–EU relations remain analytically grounded, inclusive, and responsive to changing regional and global conditions.
Importantly, the meeting enabled wide-ranging discussion across key policy domains central to Türkiye–EU relations, including:
PLURIEX – Pluriversal Excellence in EU Studies was represented at the meeting by Prof. Dr Selcen Öner, PLURIEX Communication and Knowledge Dissemination Lead. Her participation supported PLURIEX’s wider commitment to strengthening connections between scholarly expertise and policy-facing debates, the interactions and collaboration between academics and civil society and to ensuring that discussions of Europe are not confined to a single institutional or geographic viewpoint.
The meeting also reaffirmed IKV’s long-standing role as a key convenor in Türkiye–EU relations—bringing together business, civil society, and academic communities and sustaining a shared space for informed discussion. The strong participation of scholars working on EU-related issues in Türkiye—alongside postgraduate and doctoral researchers—demonstrated the vitality of the field and the continued need for forums that enable collective reflection and cross-sectoral engagement.
In line with PLURIEX’s mission of epistemic pluriversality, this event strengthened a knowledge space where multiple perspectives on Europe—across disciplines, sectors, and geopolitical experiences—can meet, contest, and co-produce more inclusive understandings of Türkiye–EU relations.
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