Abstract:

The Arab people-regime conflicts, conceptualized as a “Spring” phenomenon, started with the demand for change in the name of freedoms and economic prosperity. The Arab Spring showed its most devastating effects in revolutionary-republican countries. It continued for a short time in Tunisia and Egypt and was shaped according to the power of internal dynamics. The long-lasting Spring in Libya and Syria has drawn regional and global powers into the process. While the security and humanitarian dimensions of the people-regime conflicts drew Turkey into the process, it opened a new door for Iran’s sectarian expansionism. Thus, the question that comes to mind is how these foreign policy initiatives of Turkey and Iran, which were involved in the spring process for different reasons, were perceived in the Arab press. In this article, a multiple method is used by applying content analysis (CA) and discourse analysis (DA) to the data extracted from the samples of three Arab newspapers. As the analysis unit, columns are preferred instead of framed news of the newspapers. Mainly nationalist and Islamist writers have covered Turkish-Iranian foreign policy initiatives aimed at the Arab Spring. In this context, the nationalist discourse expressed as ‘neither the Turkish Sultan nor the Iranian Mullah’. The tone of Islamist columnists on the issue is much lower. While conditionally accepting the Turkish model of political Islam, Islamists have suggested that Iran’s sectarian expansionism must be stopped by a Sunni alliance.

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