The attempt of traditional sports to be part of the Olympics or to set an Olympic goal for themselves could bring the risk of corruption, just like other sports. Here, we need to build an alternative perspective on sports, life, the environment, and competition. We need to present a more valuable approach to traditional sports. You can call it the ‘Traditional Sports Olympics’, but the goal is not to resemble the Olympics; the focus is on difference. The opening (ceremony) here resembles the Olympics, but there are equestrian performances, and a multicultural vibrancy is at play. The message being conveyed is ‘From the Past to the Future, We Are One!’ It is not only a message for the Turkish world but for all of humanity, aiming to convey unity and solidarity. Our claim and hope are to offer a message to humanity that goes beyond the Olympics.Footnote 1
The above quote comes from the speech of Bilal Erdoğan, the president of the World Ethnosport Federation and the board member of Turkey’s Archery Foundation, who is also the son of the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Bilal Erdoğan delivered this speech at the 2022 World Nomad Games opening ceremony held in İznik, Turkey. The event, sponsored by Turkey’s Presidential Office and attended by dignitaries from various countries, displayed a wide array of traditional sports rooted in nomadic heritage. However, this quote and overall speech by Bilal Erdoğan should not be considered a mere rhetorical statement underscoring the importance of the heritagisationFootnote 2 of traditional sports. Instead, the quote summarises multiple hegemonic narratives that support the AKP-led Turkish government’s views of international order and its ‘founding’ values for several reasons. First, the quote harshly critiques the global sports industry and Western modernity. Second, it implies a normative claim that elevates traditional sports as morally and spiritually superior to globalised sport. Third, it seeks to redefine international relations through a framework of civilisational humanism, not by mirroring modern liberalism or Western values, but by endorsing a pluralistic and tradition-based moral order – adjectives commonly linked with ‘Eastern’ values. Fourth, the quote can also be interpreted as suggesting an alternative philosophy of living for the masses in Turkey and beyond, which is more communitarian, spiritual, and tradition-oriented. Overall, this simple quote that seems to highlight the importance of traditional sports covertly underscores Turkey’s alternative and allegedly superior Turkish-Islamic-Ottoman geopolitical imaginations, i.e. the social constructs and mind maps show how states spatially perceive themselves and the international order around them.Footnote 3 More importantly, this above quote also suggests that the heritagisation of traditional sports is a multiscalarFootnote 4 process spanning the biopolitical to the geopolitical, shaping a wide range of ‘spaces’, from the body of the individual(s) to the international order. Additionally, the international heritagisation of traditional sports serves as a tool for hegemony, as this type of heritagisation contains a polyphonicFootnote 5 narrative that challenges Western sports norms while promoting an alternative, ‘authentic’, and morally superior order based on alternative spatial formations that run from the biopolitical milieu of the political subject to geopolitical imaginations, or what we term heritage geopolitics.
Theorising and differentiating heritage geopolitics
Obviously, Turkey is not alone in mobilising the revival of various forms of cultural heritage at the international level. In recent years, by heritagising the ancient Silk Road as a shared legacy of peaceful trade and cultural exchange, China has repositioned itself as a ‘geocultural’, cooperative, and benevolent global power, thus using cultural heritage to support its present-day geopolitical ambitions.Footnote 6 Others, like the United States, Japan, or Gulf states, have used cultural heritage to advance their foreign policy goals or to project a certain international and national identity. This nexus of cultural heritage and international relations has been conceptualised in a variety of ways, including ‘geocultural power’, ‘cultural diplomacy’, ‘heritage diplomacy’, and ‘soft power’. At one level, for some, Turkey’s efforts to invent/resurrect heritage and collective identity at the international level can be explained by these terms as well. However, as we elaborate below, these conceptualisations miss critical elements of the processes and the sources of the mobilisation of cultural heritage at the international level. More specifically, these conceptualisations overlook what Kalaycıoğlu calls ‘productive politics’, which are the political actions and processes that do more than regulate or reflect existing values or entities, but actively produce or bring into being subjects, values, and social or political orders, including geopolitical imaginations.Footnote 7
In this article, we focus, unpack, and illustrate these processes and sources – i.e. the ‘productive politics’ – of cultural heritage at both domestic and international levels. We do so by examining the case of Turkey’s recent elite-driven and mass-inclusive heritagisation of traditional Turkish archery (TTA hereafter) in Turkey and beyond.Footnote 8 We make two interrelated arguments. First, we argue that before cultural heritage becomes a form of international power (i.e. geocultural, cultural, soft, or diplomatic), it is produced through a multiscalar spatial process. This multiscalarity extends from disciplining the body/bodies to creating new infrastructure that modifies parts of the urban space at the domestic level and mobilises a dense web of institutions, norms, and discursive practices ranging from the domestic to the international level. The road to the geopolitics of cultural heritage, in other words, starts with biopolitics and involves the creation of cross-cutting and intertwined symbolic and material/physical/infrastructural spatial formations, encapsulating the domestic as well as the international. Second, we propose that this heritagisation process is not only multiscalar but also polyphonic, as it includes multiple hegemonic narratives that simultaneously contain acts of contestation, resistance, and dominance at both domestic and international levels. We conceptualise this multiscalar and polyphonic process of cultural heritage as heritage geopolitics, where the narratives about the political subject, the symbolic space, the physical/infrastructural space, and the world are constructed in line with the politics of heritagisation and are embedded in a dense web of institutions, norms, and discursive practices. Put differently, we use space and spatial politics as an analytical category to explain the ‘productive politics’ of the heritagisation process from the domestic to the international level.
Emphasising spatiality enables us to unpack the ‘productive politics’ of heritage-making that takes place at various levels before it is projected as a ‘geocultural’, ‘cultural’, ‘soft’ power, as part of cultural, ‘geocultural’, or ‘heritage diplomacy’ at the international level. At this point, it is necessary to differentiate these above terms from our conceptual contribution – heritage geopolitics. As mentioned above, because of the utilisation of culture, i.e. TTA, at the international level, Turkey’s heritagisation of TTA can easily be termed a case of the use of ‘soft power’, ‘geocultural power’ or ‘geocultural diplomacy’, ‘cultural diplomacy’, or ‘heritage diplomacy’.Footnote 9 Heritage geopolitics, however, differs from these terms. Geocultural power, for instance, coined by Winter in the context of China’s heritagisation of the narratives of the Ancient Silk Road,Footnote 10 came to mean the strategic use of cultural heritage and historical narratives to reshape geopolitical landscapes, foster interregional cooperation, and reframe territorial and economic relations beyond national boundaries. It mobilises shared cultural imaginaries – such as the Silk Roads – to legitimise political agendas and cultivate new global connections. As WinterFootnote 11 and Bachmann et al.,Footnote 12 respectively, emphasise, geocultural power is more about ‘having the capacity’ to mobilise cultural narratives for a specifically defined foreign policy goal.
Heritage geopolitics, on the other hand, as we explain further below, does not presume that this capacity is given; instead, it investigates how this capacity is made by delving into the ‘productive politics’ across different scales, spaces, and levels. Therefore, heritage geopolitics is not interested in explaining how culturally informed narratives are mobilised to achieve foreign policy goals (cooperation, collaboration, economic gains, etc.). Rather, heritage geopolitics is interested in how heritage is used to create moral values and geopolitical imaginations linked to that which emphasises commonness (based on culture with like-minded states and ethnic groups) and difference (vis-à-vis the West) simultaneously. This simultaneous emphasis on commonalities and accentuating acceptable differences also differentiates heritage geopolitics as an analytical term from cultural diplomacy. This is because, despite its ever-changing definition, cultural diplomacy is defined as a direct and indirect governmental diplomatic practice that usually involves the mutual exchange of cultural items to create a common ground and to erase differences in the target nation to further the foreign policy goals of the cultural exchange initiating state.Footnote 13 Likewise, conceptualised by Joseph Nye, the term soft power is generally defined as getting the outcomes not by coercion but by attraction. Soft power as a source of attraction is usually a combination of culture, domestic values, and foreign policy.Footnote 14 Like cultural diplomacy, soft power aims to directly or indirectly transform the attitudes of the target state to align with the ‘preferred outcomes’ of the state which is the source of attraction.Footnote 15 Similarly, heritage diplomacy is another mechanism with dialogic and transformative potential in international politics.Footnote 16 In heritage diplomacy, heritage-related actions may both be embedded in broader diplomatic practices (heritage in diplomacy) to foster intercultural dialogue, and they may be used as the core platform (heritage as diplomacy) to enhance international dialogue and cooperation.Footnote 17 At this point, what distinguishes diplomatic and geopolitical uses of heritage depends on the nature of the discursive and instrumental uses of heritage. Diplomatic approaches achieve foreign policy goals through inclusive and co-productive methods of heritage-making, while geopolitical uses of heritage rely mostly on exclusionary narratives over-emphasising authenticity and historical rootedness to reinforce or challenge national and international hierarchies.
Recently, Winter, arguing that there is a need to analyse the emergence and the stabilisation of geocultural forms through diplomatic and cooperative structures, has offered the term geocultural diplomacy and three themes that form the basis of geocultural diplomacy: narratives, materiality, and values.Footnote 18 Nevertheless, Winter’s intention to examine the emergence and consolidation of shared geocultural forms primarily centres on international circulation and the development of related themes. This focus, however, does not address the biopolitical dimensions or the domestic spatial politics associated with the productive processes shaping geocultural forms under consideration, such as the Silk Road. Overall, our conceptualisation of heritage geopolitics builds on previous works, but it also heeds calls, such as Winter’s, that ask for ‘new modes of analysis … to account for the current developments in international cultural politics’.Footnote 19 While geocultural power, soft power, cultural diplomacy, and heritage diplomacy focus on the use of cultural assets to influence masses internationally, these concepts often emphasise the outcomes – how states attract or persuade others. Heritage geopolitics, by contrast, shifts the analytical gaze to the ‘productive politics’ that precede and shape these outcomes at the international level and, more importantly, highlights the role of multiple spaces that shape these productive politics and related discursive and institutional practices. Put differently, rather than seeing heritage as a tool to project pre-existing national identity or ‘preferred’ foreign policy outcomes, heritage geopolitics theorises and unpacks how heritage-making itself constitutes new subjectivities by reordering space, discourses, practices, relations, and institutions related to these multiple spaces in a hegemonic manner.
We illustrate our argument by unpacking the Turkish state’s elite-led mass-inclusive heritagisation of TTA and the state-funded and pro-government civil society institutions in Turkey. Guided by our multiscalar and polyphonic conceptualisation of heritage geopolitics, we trace the revival and the heritagisation of TTA as a base for commonness and differentiation that fuels Turkey’s hegemonic geopolitical imaginations at three levels of spatiality. At the domestic level, the heritagisation of TTA is one of the conservative elites’ bio-political initiatives to rearticulate Turkish identity in a Turkish-Islamic civilisational fashion. To create an ‘acceptable national subject’ whose socio-political identity is in harmony with the conservative government’s nativist ‘Muslim nation’Footnote 20 ideal, the heritagisation of TTA ‘disciplines’ the bodies of the members of this ‘Muslim nation’. Simultaneously, culturally informed geopolitical imaginations are articulated and consolidated through the recreation of landmarks, symbolic and material/infrastructural spaces, and grassroots organisations and institutions devoted to TTA at the domestic level. Likewise, the respective bodies of the archers and the spectators also become a ‘political category’Footnote 21 that circulates power and cultural authority. Heritage geopolitics, at the very individual level, helps us understand how heritagisation modifies the ‘everyday’ surrounding the body of the individual archer, the spectator – i.e. the nation – and the infrastructural space. Internationally, Turkey promotes TTA alongside other traditional sports, in culturally close regions and kin communities with shared ethnic, linguistic, or historical ties. Through various diplomatic means and geopolitical instruments – organising ‘Olympic-like’ global events, conducting global forums to revive sportive heritage, legitimation via UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) – an alternative geopolitical identity is articulated in a civilisational fashion. The cultural boundaries reach out to ‘friendly’ and ‘brotherly’ nations that are depicted as international partners mobilised to protect their authenticity, moral superiority, and uniqueness against the universal hegemonic Western-led sports industry. All these make Turkey a compelling and theoretically rich case for unpacking the concept of heritage geopolitics. In recent years, Turkey has systematically integrated heritage – particularly Ottoman-Islamic and Turkic traditions – into its nation-branding, identity politics, and foreign policy initiatives, offering valuable insight into how heritage can be mobilised to construct and assert alternative geopolitical imaginaries. Therefore, Turkey and the heritagisation of TTA are uniquely positioned to illuminate the spatiality of ‘productive politics’ of heritage that constitute what we conceptualise as heritage geopolitics.
The article, which builds upon insights from critical heritage studies, critical geopolitics, and Foucauldian biopolitics, proceeds as follows. We first offer a brief literature review at the intersection of politics of heritage in international relations, identifying the gaps, i.e. the exclusion of the ‘productive politics’ and the simultaneous strategic use of cultural heritage at different levels. Then we elaborate on the role of space in international relations, associating it with critical geopolitics and thus explaining why we juxtapose ‘geopolitics’ with ‘heritage’, as the term geopolitics in critical geopolitics means that geopolitics is not merely about territory or strategic calculations, but about the symbolic, discursive, and material production of space in the service of political power ranging from bio- to geopolitics. In the third section, we illustrate the heritagisation of TTA in three different spaces – the body of the nation, the infrastructural space, and geopolitical space – and how these spaces are intertwined with a dense web of discursive practices, symbolic spaces, and webs of institutionalisation, thus exemplifying TTA as a case of heritage geopolitics. In the conclusion, we summarise our findings and highlight the use of space as an analytical category to explain the ‘productive politics’ in the use of heritage as a power at the international level.
Politics of heritage in international relations
In the last decade, a burgeoning body of literature has explored the nexus of international relations and the politics of heritage-making. These studies discuss the mobilisation of various forms of heritage revival campaigns to (re)articulate national/regional identities, security concerns, sovereignty claims, and regional and transnational geopolitical partnerships. Heritage conservation, for example, has helped the Norwegian government in SvalbardFootnote 22 and Palestinian activistsFootnote 23 in the West Bank to make sovereignty claims to assert statehood in their respective lands. In Sweden, on the other hand, the heritagisation of the Cold War reflected the country’s contemporary security concerns.Footnote 24 The revival of cultural heritage can help states to construct and project a specific geopolitical identity. Since the Second World War, Japan has leveraged heritage conservation and leadership within UNESCO to build a cultural diplomacy centred on preservation, promoting its image as a pacifist and benevolent international actor.Footnote 25 Falconry has been reinvented as an ‘icon of local heritage’ and has been instrumentalised by the ethnopolitical elites to link the people and the Gulf Region, highlighting supposedly unique and authentic particularities of a collective Gulf culture.Footnote 26 Similarly, faced with increasing pressure from irregular migration, various social and political groups from Europe have invoked the idea of shared European heritage to reinforce solidarity, identity, and cohesion under the banner of ‘Europeanness’.Footnote 27
States can also mobilise cultural heritage to shape their international status. Turkey, for example, has used the restoration of Armenian minority heritage in Turkey and Ottoman sites abroad to project itself as an inclusive and prosperous actor of the international order.Footnote 28 Invoking the ancient Silk Road, China, on the other hand, presents the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as an ‘open and inclusive’ model of development, positioning it as a distinct and superior alternative to Western neoliberal globalisation.Footnote 29 This claim of ‘open and inclusive’ development, according to Benabdallah, has helped ‘global (re)ordering’ through claims of creating ‘a rival hegemonic order via optimistic, inclusive visions of the future’.Footnote 30 These invocations of the ancient Silk Road have also been interpreted as China being a ‘geocultural power’ with ‘the capacity to write and map geocultural histories, steering which events, places, and people are assembled into strategically expedient narratives’.Footnote 31 Important for our argument, these studies opened new avenues for exploring the emergence of cultural geographies and the use of heritage in international politics. While they offer powerful analytical tools and compelling insights into how heritage is articulated to project geopolitical ambitions, however, these works pay limited attention to the multiscalar and polyphonic ‘productive politics’ through which hegemonic heritage narratives and heritagisation practices are simultaneously constructed at local, national, and international levels to contest, resist, and dominate existing narratives of power and moral authority. To address this gap, our analysis and framework – heritage geopolitics – foregrounds the spatiality of heritage-making to examine how social meanings are produced, negotiated, and embedded through the ‘productive politics’ behind the heritage regimes. In the next section, we elaborate on the link between heritage, politics of space, and international relations to further our argument.
Spatiality and temporal politics of meaning-making in (inter)national politics
As Walker, first among the most influential scholars of the ‘spatial turn’ in International Relations (IR) discipline, highlighted, IR has been the most ‘space-oriented’ discipline of political theory.Footnote 32 The discipline itself has been built on the idea of the modern territorial state, which is defined and determined by clear-cut boundaries distinguishing inside and outside. This makes IR the discipline of understanding politics between and beyond territorial boundaries.Footnote 33 However, this outlook began to be questioned after the Cold War as the world experienced profound social, economic, political, and military transformations.Footnote 34 Critical IR scholars’ call for deconstructing the territoriality of the modern state opened new venues to discuss the spatiality of the modern state, with critics targeting the classical territorial assumptions that have neglected the sub-state (local and domestic) and post-state (regional, transnational) spaces in which statehood and its identity are constantly (re)articulated, challenged, and negotiated.Footnote 35 As Agnew highlights, we need a spatial approachFootnote 36 that seeks to bridge state and society/micro and macro levels to fully understand and explain the political behaviour.Footnote 37
Spatial analyses in IR mainly focus on discourses that generate geopolitical imaginations, framing the ideational boundaries that differentiate the self from the other.Footnote 38 With its emphasis on the relational and anti-essentialist aspect of spatial knowledge, critical geopolitics defines space as an unfixed political category evolved around historical power struggles and political imaginaries.Footnote 39 More specifically, ‘the geography of the world is not a product of nature but a product of histories of struggle between competing authorities over the power to organize, occupy, and administer space’.Footnote 40 Critical geographers do not disregard or underscore the existence of administrative borders or other material bases of political and economic ties. However, spatial knowledge is based on socially and politically constructed assumptions or imaginationsFootnote 41 that states, policymakers, social groups, and individuals use to interpret global politics and define their position within it. In other words, the clustering of human collectivities might not be limited to the material national borders. This aspect of critical geopolitics clarifies the region-making practices that territorially and temporally transcend national boundaries and attempt to construct transnational collective identities.Footnote 42
Temporality is another dimension of spatial analyses in international politics. The political construction of space is contextual, and it not only reflects present power relations but also uncovers historical struggles and temporal narratives about the identity of space.Footnote 43 At this point, attempts to preserve cultural heritage are essential to constructing temporality through which states and other actors inscribe historical narratives onto space, legitimising territorial claims, national identities, and geopolitical ambitions.Footnote 44 Under the national cultural heritage conservation policies, certain practices, rituals, landmarks, tools, crafts, arts, etc., have been labelled as the distinctive cultural and natural reservoir of people (citizens) and homeland.Footnote 45 The physical space and the memory tied to the physical space are altered in the process of heritage making, ‘turning competing pasts into “the Past” and altering the physical space related to the city, land, and individual and collective memories related to these spaces’.Footnote 46 Therefore, preservation, construction, or invention of heritage sites are spatial-temporal practices that legitimise or contest hegemony over social space.Footnote 47 Politics of heritage, therefore, privileges and values certain pasts while marginalising and excluding others, strengthening certain narratives about who belongs where, and for what reason.Footnote 48 In these spatial and temporal forms, nations, societies, communities, and individuals use heritage to shape identity, foster belonging, and wield significant emotional power.Footnote 49 In this sense, heritage is central in creating or consolidating an abstract idea of a community (nation–society–masses–the people), tied together with an imagination of the collective past,Footnote 50 selectively and contextually appropriating certain cultural forms and traditions as being the cement of society.Footnote 51 Put differently, one cannot really separate the productive politics of heritagisation from spatial-temporal aspects of politics.
Based on this framework, both the ‘spatial turn in IR’ and the spatiality of heritage regimes highlight political and power-laden ways in which space and time are constructed. Drawing on post-structuralist critical theory, heritage and knowledge of geography are considered a (Foucauldian sense of) discourse and practice that marks who has authority to speak and be heard,Footnote 52 and a spatial-temporal mediumFootnote 53 that circulates political power.Footnote 54 In this sense, power refers to the social distance between hegemonic discourse and its rivals and alternatives.Footnote 55 It is a relational social force with the capacity and legitimacy to define and place collective bodies as the insiders and the outsiders.Footnote 56 Both geography and cultural heritage are, therefore, the politicised knowledge of space and time driven by the current and evolving asymmetries of social distancing, inclusion, and exclusion,Footnote 57 which will be very evident when Turkey, by heritagising TTA, distances itself from the West in terms of moral values.
To better capture the multiscalarity of heritage geopolitics, we add another layer to our investigation – biopolitics,Footnote 58 as the resource of individual and national/domestic levels of analysis. To elaborate on the political production of the national body as a spatial form, we follow a Foucauldian approach that distinguishes modern ways of governing and monitoring life and death as a means to govern masses, population, or nations in its absolute terms. Foucault highlights in his genealogical analysesFootnote 59 that the anatomo-politics of the medieval ages – the hegemon’s authority over life and death – gave way to biopolitics in the modern era. In order to address the new entity of the political arena – their populations – nation-states adopted new mechanisms securing and fostering life through institutionalising sophisticated means, together with legal and disciplinary mechanisms (discipline through surveillance, deterrence, proportionate punishment, diagnosing, physical correction/education, rehabilitation, population planning, etc.). Thus, the modern age became the site for biopolitics that prioritised the correction and regulation of the population in line with the necessities of the latest inventions of the modern era, i.e. ‘the nation-state’. The protection and regulation of society ‘as a biological whole assumes the provision of a central authority that governs and controls it, watches over its purity, and is strong enough to confront “enemies” within its borders and beyond: the modern state’.Footnote 60 Since the heritagisation of TTA involves performative and institutional arrangements concerning the bodily and social existence of the archer, we treat the archer’s body as another spatial element representing an idealised form of collective body – the nation. The regulations introduced for the heritagisation of TTA and the narration of archery as an ancestral sport result in the emergence of new biopolitical governmentalities. Having outlined the overlaps between heritage politics, international relations, and the role of space and meaning-making at different levels, the next section, through the heritagisation of TTA, illustrates the bio- to geopolitical dynamics of this multiscalar, polyphonic process of heritage geopolitics.
Heritage geopolitics unpacked: The politics of meaning-making through the revival of traditional Turkish archery in modern Turkey
A brief historical background
In the early 20th century, sports became a disciplinary tool to shape strong, loyal citizens, with athletes and clubs symbolising modern nations’ physical strength and superiority, far beyond mere leisure.Footnote 61 The reformists of the late Ottoman era also appropriated this modernist and nationalist tool. While athletic disciplines such as (modern) wrestling, boxing, weightlifting, and gymnastics were likewise promoted, and soccer soon turned into the main attraction,Footnote 62 traditional militarised sports like archery and javelin (cirit) were neglected due to the disappearance of the value-added of these medieval era martial practices, especially concerning the practicality and advantage of modern war technologies.
The first wave of reviving traditional sports went back to the first decades of the newly founded Turkish Republic. Oil wrestling had a special place in the republican elites’ campaign to mark Turkish uniqueness and attach modern Turkish citizens to the ages-old sports practised distinctively everywhere in the nationalised territories (homeland).Footnote 63 In addition to this, archery, as a sports heritage, was revisited in 1937 by the elites of modern Turkey. A group of volunteers established Ok Spor (the Archery Sport Institution) under a state-led local public education centre, Beyoğlu People’s House.Footnote 64 However, until recently, TTA was overshadowed by the popularity of modern archery and other popular sports branches.
The second wave of the revival of traditional sports in Turkey started in the second term of the ruling AKP government. During the AKP’s first term in government, party elites presented the identity of this new political organisation as a centre-right, pro-EU, pro-business ‘post-Islamist’ party representing a wide range of ideologies and interests. Within a decade, however, subsequent electoral victories and the elimination of potential challengers, as well as checks and prioritisation of loyalty over merit, transformed the AKP into a nativist populist and a neo-patrimonial authoritarian party.Footnote 65 This shift further alienated the AKP from reformist parties and pro-democratisation social groups and pushed it closer to parties like the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which promote nationalist and ethno-culturally essentialist discourses about national identity and Turkey’s respective position in world politics. This repositioning in Turkish politics resulted in the ruling elites’ embracing essentialism infused with ethno-cultural references. At this point, the narrative that frames Turkey as the bearer of Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic identity in an ethnocentric manner served as the ideological backdrop shaping both the nation-building process in domestic politics and the manifestations of Turkey’s international positioning in foreign policy. Towards the end of its second term, subsequent AKP governments adopted a manifest nativist populist discourse in which the glorious times of the Ottoman dynasty and the ‘golden’ ages of Islamic civilisation were selectively remembered.Footnote 66 Conceptualised as neo-Ottomanism,Footnote 67 the term came to denote a specific religiously loaded worldview that anachronistically romanticised the Ottoman Empire as a pax Ottomana. The ethnic, cultural, and religious values uniquely positioned the Ottoman Empire as an order creator capable of ruling over different nations and ethnic groups.
Based on this, at the domestic level, emotions such as nostalgia, resentment, and national pride have been mobilised in the use of contemporary political agendas to create a more cohesive Turkish self. From a neo-Ottomanist foreign policy perspective, Turkey, as the Ottoman Empire’s heir, is seen as capable of restoring order amid global disorder by inheriting the Empire’s perceived legacy of stability. Subsequent AKP governments, by emphasising a shared and idealised Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic heritage, sought to legitimise their hegemony and foster a sense of belonging in Turkey and beyond, reinforcing an ethno-cultural-religious worldview.Footnote 68 We now turn to this nexus where ‘productive politics’ have been woven into the spatial formations, dense web of institutions and norms, and discursive practices, first at the domestic and then at the international levels, to explain how heritage geopolitics works. As we mentioned in the introduction, this process is a multiscalar and polyphonic hegemonic process that ranges from individual to international levels, containing acts of contestation, resistance, and domination.
Reconstructing the archers’ lodge: Infrastructural space meets biopolitics
In the case of TTA, the multiscalarity of heritage geopolitics manifested itself in two steps at the domestic level. The first was the ‘reconstruction’ of the physical space(s) where heritagisation would be conducted. The second was to find and recruit the archers and the spectators, and to discipline their bodies and minds – the creation of the biopolitical symbolic space. As we illustrate below, both constructions of space were imbued with a dense web of institutions, norms, and discursive practices, constituting a polyphonic hegemonic process empowering Turkey’s ruler to produce their Turkish-Ottomanist-Islamic ideology and making claims of superiority at both the domestic and international levels. This revival of Turkish-Ottomanist-Islamist ideology ‘challenged’ Kemalism by promoting autonomous foreign policy goals and cultural diversity through religion. It contested Turkey’s Western alignment and questioned the Kemalist national homogeneity.Footnote 69
The infrastructural space
The first step in the spatial intervention of the heritagisation of archery began with the recreation/resurrection of the Ottoman era religio-cultural space – The Archers’ Lodge (Okçular Tekkesi) – located in the Okmeydanı district of Istanbul. Historical sources date the formation of the district of Okmeydanı, which can be translated into English as the ‘Archery Square’, to Mehmet the Conqueror and the conquest of Istanbul in 1453 and report it as a medieval-era military base which was contained marker stones (to celebrate the marksmanship of the archers), a small place of worship (masjid), and a foundation (vaqıf) under Mehmet the Conqueror’s name. Over the centuries, the complex expanded to include a dervish lodge but fell into disrepair by the late 19th century. By the mid-20th century, when squatter houses took over the area due to the rapid urbanisation of Istanbul, not much was left of these structures.Footnote 70 Between 2007 and 2013, however, in a joint effort by the newly created foundations (vakıf)Footnote 71 – among them, the Archery Foundation, whose executive board includes Bilal Erdoğan, and the local municipality, whatever was left from the Ottoman-era structures was ‘revived’ (ihya edilmek).Footnote 72 This ‘revival’ of the heritage space meant that an entirely new complex housing a research centre, a library, a physical and online archery museum, a masjid, and a dervish lodge (tekke) was rebuilt from scratch.Footnote 73
The opening ceremony of the ‘revived’ Archers’ Lodge took place on 29 May 2013, a day that coincided with the anniversary of Istanbul’s conquest in 1453. The organisers of the ceremony at the Archery Foundation deliberately chose the date to emphasise archery’s connection to Mehmet the Conqueror, the Conquest of Istanbul, and the Ottoman Empire. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was the prime minister at the time, was also in attendance at the opening ceremony and did not miss the opportunity to make links between Istanbul’s conquest, archery, and Turkey’s foreign policy activism. In this way, TTA as heritage became part of Turkey’s geopolitical imaginations, projecting power and domination. Erdoğan stated:
it is from here that Mehmet the Conqueror’s armies set out on their campaigns … This is the location where they did archery and shot arrows. Now, it is this very location that is where history is now rising …Footnote 74
After underlining the fact that the Lodge was being opened on the anniversary of the Conquest of Istanbul and Mehmed the Conqueror’s acts of ‘benevolence’ after the conquest of Istanbul, Erdoğan went on to argue:
in our civilisation, conquest does not mean taking over territories, states, and cities; it also means winning hearts, the conquest of the affect (gönül). The Republic of Turkey was built on the foundations of the Ottoman state, which was a universal (cihan) state that aimed at winning the affection (gönül) and hearts in all geographies where it existed.Footnote 75
In other words, as an infrastructural space, the Lodge became a focal point in Erdoğan’s geopolitical imagination in narrating the Ottoman Empire’s march to the world to create a ‘universal’ empire and equating that with Turkey’s future world domination. Such a statement was in line with President Erdoğan’s neo-Ottomanist sense of a ‘rising’ Turkey – an order setter – simply by virtue of being heir to the Ottoman Empire. In other words, the physical/infrastructural space devoted to TTA was mobilised to construct the geopolitical imagination that Turkey is on its way to becoming a ‘benevolent superpower’ – like the Ottoman Empire, potentially to reach out to like-minded countries within and beyond its vicinity. This exemplifies heritage geopolitics, where the space of heritage is not recreated and preserved but has become a material anchor for projecting civilisational narratives, moral authority, and geopolitical aspirations that reconfigure both domestic identities and geopolitical imaginations.
In line with this hegemonic geopolitical imagination geared towards domination, this opening ceremony was followed by the First Conquest Cup (Fetih Kupası), which then quickly became an international competition, drawing competitors from various parts of the world but more prominently from the countries of the Turkic states and the Global South. The website of the Archery Foundation states that the purpose of ‘the Conquest Cup is to make sure that Istanbul’s Conquest and the establishment of the Archer’s Lodge contribute to world peace, to reflect the Turkish culture of tolerance’.Footnote 76 Overall, the resurrection of this sports-culture complex along with TTA is a value-laden, power-driven hegemonic act of spatial-temporal meaning-making. The lodge’s association with conquest and the ‘golden ages’ of the Ottoman Empire reflects the neo-Ottoman understanding of the interconnection between military hegemony, faith, and state power.
The productive politics of infrastructural space and biopolitical spatialisation of heritage
The revival of the Archers’ Lodge aligns with the AKP’s Turkish-Ottoman-Islamist agenda of a militarist bio-political intervention, which reconnects contemporary Turkey to the romanticised ‘golden ages’ of the Ottoman Empire with the bodies of the archers and the spectators. The idea of disciplining the bodies through military and religious rituals and a sense of moral superiority tied to religion and militarism is the key to this bio-political intervention. The regulation of the body at the individual level is reflected in various forms: within the narratives presented by the online and physical museums of the Archers’ Lodge, the endorsement of rituals associated with TTA, and the discourses delivered by the political elite. The online and physical museums dedicated to the reconstructed heritage space, the Archers’ Lodge, are narrated as having dual functions in the past and the present. The first emphasis in this narration is the Lodge’s significance as a strategic and military station that enabled the conquest of Istanbul. The second is the emphasis placed on the complex’s function as a public sphere, where during peacetime people gathered to watch performances and rituals of archers, and, in times of war and disasters, its transformation as a public space for prayer.Footnote 77 This religious character of the infrastructural space is also revived with the spatial arrangements. The Lodge, just like the old days, today contains a dervish’s lodge, which is a religious space that functioned in the past for religious education, spiritual practices, social gatherings, and theological discussions. Religion and emphasis on Islamic culture are reflected in the ritualistic aspects of contemporary archery organisations conducted in this space. For example, the reporting of the opening ceremony of the Conquest Cups, which was held to coincide with the anniversaries of the Conquest of Istanbul, pays special emphasis on archers shouting ‘Ya Hak’ (‘oh Lord’) while shooting arrows, which is also among the rituals of this reconstructed tradition, along with Quran recitation.Footnote 78 As a physical space, the ‘revived’ lodge merges with symbolic space emanating from history, military tradition, ethno-religious continuities, and political identity, reinforcing the boundaries of the Turkish self as well as the moral character of the nation. Through this newly ‘revived’ infrastructural space, the revival of TTA and its religio-military rituals, the ‘bodies’ of Turkish subjects are ‘disciplined’ as Muslim and by way of that noble – a narrative that deeply aligns with the revival of Ottoman-Turkish heritage and traditional cultural practices interwoven with Islam. This reflects a core mechanism of heritage geopolitics, where spatially interwoven heritage practices not only construct geopolitical imaginations but also regulate and cultivate subjectivities through biopolitics, thus reinforcing a moral-spatial order that legitimises Turkey’s domestic authority and its international aspirations.
This ethno-religious biopolitical spatialisation is highlighted in politicians’ statements, thus highlighting the role of discursive practices in the making of heritage geopolitics. For instance, President Erdoğan claimed that endeavours aiming at the betterment of Turkey’s sports heritage would contribute to the Turkish state’s priority to raise, by ‘introducing them to our cultural codes’, virtuous and healthy young generations who ‘know themselves, their culture, their history, and their civilisation … After those who manage their body well, manage their homes well, those who manage their homes well, manage their country well.’Footnote 79 Erdoğan’s speech, intertwined with biopolitical and cultural connotations, neatly underscores the diffusion of biopolitics from the micro to the macro level. It also signifies the instrumentality of traditional sports for social engineering and moral rehabilitation of the collective body – the nation. TTA, therefore, is presented and celebrated as a bodily and social performance that would reinforce the sense of cultural community and strengthen the individual and collective body of Turkish subjects imbued with Islamic values and a sense of Ottoman heritage. This dual identity of TTA as a sports activity and a culture is at the centre of its official and popular framings. In this way, Erdoğan depicts TTA as an elite yet inclusive sport, marking a high culture of taste and a sophisticated mental and physical condition, with core values of physical power, resilience, mental fullness, mission-driven mindset, and moral purity, all geared towards empowering the nation, the state, and beyond.
TTA’s biopolitical space-making via the body was also evident in President Erdoğan’s other statements. In 2020, during the opening remarks of the 8th Conquest Cup, Erdoğan emphasised the moral and physical superiority of archery culture by stating:
For our ancestors, archery was not just a military drill for preparing for war but also a collection of values that organised social and human life. For this reason, entering the archery field without ablution or while drunk was prohibited … In addition to the archers’ skills, their morals and personalities were also assessed in the admission tests. It was never acceptable for athletes to harbour hatred. Before sports competitions, Bismillah (In the name of God) was always recited, and blessings were sent upon our Prophet Muhammad. Along with competition in sports, solidarity and nobility were also encouraged.Footnote 80
The revival of TTA and the religio-cultural value attribution processes manifest in disciplining the body within a Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic framework, which upholds specific moral standards. Moral purity, cleanliness, but more importantly, a sense of hegemonic superiority, are reinforced through references to Islamic rituals embedded in TTA. Within this framework, religious morality and military regimen are presented as core principles and distinctive elements of Turkish identity, as well as the defining characteristic that distinguishes and differentiates Western and Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic civilisational standards, highlighting the alleged superiority of the Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic one. All these show that before the ruling elites project any geopolitical imagination as a power at the international level, a hegemonic heritagisation process at the individual level needs to take place by creating the crowd and the audience to believe in the features – religion and military superiority – that will fuel such imaginations.
The institutional productive politics of heritage geopolitics
As we argued in the introduction, heritage geopolitics becomes a complete framework only when productive politics is considered alongside spatial formations, discursive practices, and institutionalisation as an integrated whole. The hub of the dense web of institutional network was established with the foundation of the Archery Foundation, which was housed in the newly ‘revived’ Archers’ Lodge. As mentioned in the introduction, this Foundation’s executive board included Bilal Erdoğan, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son, along with AKP members. This foundation became one of the most significant cultural entrepreneurs, leading the heritagisation and, thus, the institutionalisation of TTA in Turkey and beyond. Given the established organic connections between party members and the Foundation’s executive board, it can be concluded that the Foundation operates as a semi-governmental organisation. In addition to its close connection with the Turkish state, the Foundation shaped spatial-temporal narratives by associating TTA with neo-Ottoman nostalgia, notably adopting 1453 – the year Istanbul was conquered – as its symbolic founding date rather than its actual establishment in 2013. This gesture links the Ottoman Empire’s geopolitical power, Mehmet the Conqueror’s archery legacy, and TTA. At the domestic level, the heritagisation of TTA intensified as ministries and AKP-led municipalities partnered with the Foundation to institutionalise it and attract new archers and audience. For example, the Ministry of Culture reprinted a 15th-century archery book by a former dervish lodge leader renowned for his skill.Footnote 81 Additionally, the Ministry of Youth and Sports and AKP-led municipalities launched public tenders to fund archery fields and training centres across Turkey for all age groups.Footnote 82 Turkish archery gained visibility through TV series highlighting Ottoman history and national heroes, including one devoted to 15th-century master archer Tozkoparan İskender.Footnote 83
The peak of TTA’s domestic level of institutionalisation came with the creation of a separate federation in February 2019, which was further solidified by a dedicated charter in April 2021.Footnote 84 This ‘new and separate’ Federation defined its mission as ‘domestic and international promotion and enhancing the recognition of TTA, which has been passed down for thousands of years through a master–apprentice relationship and is a shared cultural value of Turkish society both as a sport and a cultural practice’,Footnote 85 illustrating one more time the role of productive politics and temporality in the heritagisation process that is taking place in the present day.
In summary, as TTA undergoes heritagisation, everyday narratives promote Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic values of religious morality and military discipline, linking personal collective spaces in shaping geopolitical imaginations of self. Having discussed bodily and infrastructural spatialisation of TTA, the following section analyses the third concentric circle of heritage geopolitics: the international voyage of TTA.
Heritage geopolitics at the international level: The productive politics and geopolitical imaginations rooted in TTA
Productive politics, institutions, and institutionalisations at the international level
Since the 2010s, AKP-led Turkey has increasingly projected itself as a restorative (both spatial and political sense) actor destined to reorganise Turkey’s spatial-cultural landscape in the friendly countries and the lands that the Ottoman Empire ruled for centuries. In line with Turkey’s claim to global actorness, as a ‘rising power’, Ottoman-era buildings, shrines, mosques, and the like were restored, resurrected, and repaired in Turkey and in the lands where the Ottoman dynasty ruled for centuries.Footnote 86 In May 2024, Turkey’s minister of culture, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, announced that the Directorate General of Foundations had spent 8 billion Turkish liras over 22 years on 5,450 restorations, many in the ‘geographies of affect’ – countries once part of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 87 As a result, the revival and the heritagisation of TTA should be considered part of this more extensive campaign to revive Ottoman heritage in Turkey and Turkey’s ethno-cultural hinterland. Similar to the domestic level, the internationalisation of the heritagisation of TTA at this ‘third scale’ was embedded in the ‘productive politics’ of dense institutions and networks and discursive practices attempting to empower Turkey’s Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic geopolitical imaginations, which aimed at creating a collective transnational identity with ethno-culturally like-minded states that positioned Turkey as the leader of this collective.
This internationalisation of the heritagisation of TTA and the attempts to project it as a ‘geocultural’ power that would fulfil Turkey’s geopolitical imaginations took place in various ways. The first was the internationalisation of the existing local archery competitions and/or the establishment of other platforms to create further venues for competition. Beginning in 2013 with the Conquest Cup on Istanbul’s 560th anniversary, the event grew from 115 archers from 30 states to an annual tournament under the ‘patronage’ (himaye) of Turkey’s presidency, attracting 500 archers from 32 countries in 2024 and 700 from 40 countries in 2025.Footnote 88 Additionally, in 2017, the Yunus Emre Institute, the institution responsible for promoting Turkish culture abroad, in collaboration with the Archery Foundation, launched the Kemankeş project to promote Turkish sports heritage.Footnote 89 As part of this project, under the motto ‘Turkish Archery on World Stage’, this institute held courses and exhibitions in over 40 countries.Footnote 90
The key step in the internationalisation of TTA took place in 2015, by establishing another state-supported civil initiative – the World Ethnosport Confederation (WEC) – headquartered in Istanbul. Headed by Bilal Erdoğan, who is also on the executive board of the Archery Foundation, the WEC announced its mission is to ‘develop, apply, monitor, and assess innovative strategies for the purpose of regulating, popularising, professionalising, and universalising traditional sports and games in order to struggle against the inequality in cultural and sportive opportunities among societies’.Footnote 91 Drawing membership mostly from ancestor sports clubs from countries of the Global SouthFootnote 92 and the Global East, the WEC started to organise the World Ethnosport Festival in Turkey and brought Kyrgyzstan’s ethnic sports events – Nomad Games – to Turkey in 2020. Meanwhile, the WEC began to organise international and semi-diplomatic annual meetings, such as the World Ethnosports Summit, under another initiative supporting Turkey’s global actorness in the revival of traditional sports. This step was meaningful because it showed the WEC was motivated not only by the preservation and revival of traditional sportive cultures but also by positioning Turkey as the ‘leader’ of this global mission. The following quote from Bilal Erdoğan, explaining the WEC’s endeavour to popularise traditional sports, can be read as one such example.
We must also keep the problematic aspects of powerful sports industries – such as match-fixing, doping, and gambling – away from our traditional sports world … In sports, winning is not everything; we aim to preserve a spirit of sportsmanship where the loser respects the winner, and the winner extends a hand to the loser, just as it has been passed down through cultures. If we can achieve the revival and global expansion of traditional sports games at the desired level, this comeback will serve as a lesson to the modern sports industry, which, unfortunately, has been tainted by various forms of corruption.Footnote 93
The above quote can be interpreted as an example of heritage geopolitics in action, whereby Turkey’s efforts in spatio-temporal geopolitical framing turn into a ‘mission’ against established sports industries, resisting and contesting the pre-given hegemony of modern sports. Finally, the internationalisation of TTA was advanced through Turkey’s strategic use of UNESCO’s legitimacy-enhancing features.Footnote 94 First, in 2018, Turkey hosted the Fourth Collective Consultation on Traditional Sports,Footnote 95 and in 2019, TTA was inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.Footnote 96 This recognition supported Turkey’s aim to diversify the global sports order by emphasising ethnic and cultural particularities within national and transnational identities. Finally, in 2021, Turkey and Kyrgyzstan jointly worked to inscribe the Nomad Games in UNESCO’s Register of Good Safeguarding Practices.Footnote 97 The Nomad Games, whose mission is stated as ‘covers the revival, development, and preservation of the ethnocultural diversity, and originality of the people of the world to foster a more tolerant and open relationship between people’,Footnote 98 aligns with Turkey’s hegemonic heritagisation of TTA, reinforcing cultural revival and geopolitical identity-building internationally.
Geopolitical imaginations: Hegemonic process of spatial-temporal meaning-making at the international level
As exemplified by the quotes above, the narrative surrounding the heritagisation of TTA is, at the same time, meant to bring “social justice” at the international level, by attempting to reshuffle the current centres of cultural power. Geopolitically, this attempt to bring some level of “social justice” supports Turkey’s counter-hegemonic stance against assumed Western universality, allowing Turkey to challenge Western norms and reclaim the ‘moral ground’ from the West, which Turkish elites often criticise for hypocrisy and injustice.Footnote 99 Debated as a ‘rising power’ by some scholarsFootnote 100 and presented by Turkey’s state and government officials as such,Footnote 101 the heritagisation of TTA enables Turkey to challenge and renegotiate Western hegemony not only through Turkey’s involvement in international politics, as has been the case in recent years, but also in the realm of culture. This counter-cultural claim, in turn, strengthens and further legitimises Turkey’s geopolitical claim to be an aspiring ‘power’ and an order setter at the international level – thus, contesting, resisting, and dominating the geopolitical imaginations in a hegemonic manner.
This cultural and geopolitical imagination, based on delivering ‘justice’ through the act of heritagisation of TTA, not only underpins Turkey’s aspiration to reshape the international order but also again, through linking TTA and the Ottoman ‘justice’, invokes a reconstructed Ottoman legacy that frames military and religious virtues as foundational to a just, anachronistically ‘multicultural’, and moral global order setter. That is, Ottoman competence in archery is highlighted as being one of the material sources that enabled Turkish sultans to reach out to the alleged persecuted inhabitants of a vast geography and to unite the divided Turkish and Islamic lands. In line with this, Ottoman-era religiously motivated military campaigns (jihads) are reimagined as the contribution of Turkish people to the ascendence of peace, order, and the collective heritage of humanity. Bilal Erdoğan’s following statements make this hegemonic link:
Our ancestors were the supporters of a rooted belief. They rode horses, shot arrows, and wielded swords across the world. They did this for peace and order. They did not do these to massacre persecuted people as today’s hegemons are performing. They waged jihad – holy war to emancipate them (i.e., the persecuted people).Footnote 102
The idealisation of Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic civilisational characteristics and the allegedly degraded nature of non-Turkish and non-Muslim (generally Western) others are also evident in Erdoğan’s above-mentioned speech. He, again, covertly stigmatises and contests the hegemons of the day (Western powers) with destruction, exploitation, and imperialism. As Çınar summarises, this is in line with the Islamist civilisational account that finds Western civilisation ‘is morally degenerate, materialist, and imperialist due to its secular character, which causes it to reduce everything to “might” and therefore fails to produce a just society’.Footnote 103
Others made similar remarks focusing on justice and linking TTA, the Ottoman Empire, and the geopolitical outlook for Turkey. In 2020, the speaker of Turkey’s Grand National Assembly, Mustafa Şentop, at the opening of an exhibition titled ‘The Adventures of the Turkish Archery’ in Skopje, in North Macedonia, said that ‘we are shooting the arrow at our supreme purpose (ulvi gaye). [We are for] establishing righteousness and truth, justice, serenity, peace, and fraternity, like an arrow we follow that is truthful, uncompromising, fast, and accurate.’ In the same ceremony, the head of the Archery Foundation, Haydar Ali Yıldız, argued that by resurrecting traditional ancestor sports, the Archery Foundation was pleased to contribute to the civilisation-constructing efforts of President Erdoğan.Footnote 104 Put differently, through the heritagisation of TTA, Turkey’s geopolitical imagination of domination is constructed and projected. It is this discourse based on the alleged delivery of ‘justice’ that also enabled Turkey to claim a role in constructing a cultural/civilisational landscape and setting regional and international order and peace as being the protector of the weak and the mistreated by the West, i.e. the Global South,Footnote 105 thus becoming the last of the concentric circles that heritage geopolitics represents.
Conclusion
This study has argued and illustrated that to understand how intangible cultural heritage functions as any form of power at the international level, it is essential first to deconstruct the ‘productive politics’ surrounding and shaping the material and symbolic spatial formations of heritage. We introduced heritage geopolitics as a framework to unpack and understand this complex, multilayered spatial politics of cultural heritage and used the case of Turkey’s efforts to heritagise TTA in Turkey and beyond. Through the case of TTA, we have shown how heritage-making is far more than a commemorative or aesthetic endeavour; it is a strategic, multiscalar, and polyphonic hegemonic process deeply embedded in producing geopolitical meaning, national identity, and biopolitical governance. Integrating insights from critical geopolitics, critical heritage studies, and Foucauldian biopolitics, we argued that the heritagisation of TTA does not occur at a single level of space, but across intertwined scales of spaces – from the disciplining of individual bodies to the transformation of urban space, and onwards to the construction of geopolitical imaginations based on ethno-religious transnational civilisational imaginaries. Moreover, heritagisation of TTA is a polyphonic hegemonic process that attempts to contest, resist, and dominate at both the domestic and international levels.
In this multiscalar understanding of heritage geopolitics that runs from bio- to geopolitics, we illustrated that the body emerges as the key space through which geopolitical imaginations are performed, regulated, disciplined, narrated, and moralised at the domestic level, based on the religio-militaristic rituals of TTA. With respect to this, an ‘acceptable national subject’ whose socio-political identity is in harmony with the conservative government’s nativist ‘Muslim nation’ account is structured in line with the ethnoreligious discursive and performative bio-political order, dictating the new ‘normal’ and acceptable citizen. As much as the revival of archery as an ancestral sport is not only a biopolitical intervention into the moral and physical training of the citizen-subject, it is also a symbolic act that reclaims and reorders space, such as the reconstruction of the Archers’ Lodge, both as an infrastructural space as well as a monumental site of Turkish-Ottoman-Islamic heritage. These spaces serve as physical anchors of a nationalised past, disciplining present-day identities in line with an ethno-religious civilisational narrative that undergirds Turkish cities’ spatial identity. Meanwhile, the impact of the construction of these physical and symbolic spaces is amplified by discursive practices and a dense network of institutions that run from domestic to international. Through the Archery Foundation and the World Ethnosport Confederation (WEC) and events like the Conquest Cup and Nomad Games, an item of intangible heritage like TTA becomes a medium for constructing geopolitical imaginations, attempting to contest Western superiority, and, through projecting an alternative, morally superior imaginations that accompany Turkey’s foreign policy goals of global actorness. In this context, Turkey positions itself not simply as a state among others but as an alternative power, claiming moral authority, civilisational depth, and normative distinctiveness vis-à-vis the Western-dominated global order, mostly based on a nativist neo-Ottoman nostalgia decorated with an epic, romanticised narration of the Ottoman geopolitical order. As such, the heritagisation of traditional Turkish archery becomes not merely an icon of cultural revival but a sophisticated geopolitical manoeuvre that aims to establish Turkey as a central actor in an alternative cultural geopolitical order.
Overall, heritage geopolitics is a multiscalar and polyphonic framework revealing how states deploy intangible cultural heritage at various levels to reconstruct national identity, negotiate their international standing, assert moral superiority, and propose alternative culturally based geopolitical orders, highlighting commonness but also acceptable differences. By focusing on the heritagisation of TTA in Turkey and beyond with heritage politics at the global scale, this study contributed to the broadening of the scope of international politics of cultural heritage scholarship, demonstrating that understanding the dynamics of cultural heritage being projected as any form of power at the international level, one needs to look deep into the ‘productive politics’ of the heritagisation processes across multiple scales. This article, through the heritagisation of TTA, unpacked the politics of heritage as a present-oriented and power-driven component of the social system while deconstructing the embedded interwoven spatial hierarchies and formations to renegotiate Western-led cultural hegemony and to create an alternative cultural geopolitical order, thus showing ‘archery is never just about archery’.Footnote 106 Instead, it is about power.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the editors, the anonymous reviewers of the journal, and the editors of this special issue for their helpful suggestions for further improving the article. We declare the use of ChatGPT (Version GPT-4o [also known as Omni]) for the initial rough translation of some of the block quotes of the political elite referred to throughout the article from Turkish into English, and Grammarly (Version v1.2.179.1714) for overall language editing of the article.
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