Review Reassessing Turkey’s Soft Power: The Rules of Attraction Senem B. C¸ evik 1 Abstract Since the mid-2000s, Turkey has incorporated a soft power discourse into its foreign policy agenda and shifted its attention toward building up its soft power infrastructure. Up until 2013, Turkey was applauded as a regional powerhouse, an important player in the soft power arena, and a beacon of democracy and stability within an unstable region. However, the restrictions on free speech, media censorship, and the crackdown on the opposition have impacted Turkey’s current soft power ranking. While expanding its diplomatic network and public diplomacy apparatus to wield soft power, Turkey’s global reputation has seen a downward spiral. This article investigates the role that political leadership and political values play in determining Turkey’s soft power capacity. This arti- cle’s main contention is that while Turkey increases its global engagement and capacity to appeal non-Western audiences, its capacity to attract international audiences particularly in the West has diminished due to its democratic backsliding. Keywords Turkey, soft power, power, regional powers, nation brand Introduction The mid-2000s were marked by the ascendance of Turkey into global affairs as both a rising regional powerhouse and as an aspiring actor in the Middle East and the Balkans. Turkey, traditionally relying on hard power such as military operations in its region, has since shifted its attention to building up a soft power policy particularly in respect to its neighbors. Diplomacy replaced the once military operations or confrontations with neighbors such as Greece and Syria. Until 2013, the international community applauded Turkey as both an emerging regional powerhouse and an emer- ging actor in the arena of soft power, a beacon of budding democracy and stability in an unstable region. Nonetheless, restrictions on free speech, media censorship, and the crackdown against opposition have throttled Turkey’s capacity to attract international audiences, particularly those in the West. The previous scholarship on Turkey’s soft power has highlighted Turkey’s democratization process that was underway until the elections in 2011 (Altunıs¸ık, 2008; Kalin, 2011; Kiris¸c¸i, 1 Department of Global and International Studies, School of Social Sciences, University of California–Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA Corresponding Author: Senem B. C¸ evik, Department of Global and International Studies, School of Social Sciences, University of California–Irvine, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Email: scevik@uci.edu Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 1-22 ª The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0304375419853751 journals.sagepub.com/home/alt