Geopolitical imaginations and construction of ‘the people’: Turkey’s populist spatial logic in its engagement with Africa

Abstract Research on foreign policy at the intersection of International Relations, critical geopolitics and the study of populism remains limited, particularly regarding emerging powers. While political geographers have shown that foreign policy is shaped by geopolitical imaginations, little attention has been paid to how populist logics inform the spatial articulation of such imaginaries. The article addresses this gap by introducing ‘Populist Spatial Logic’ (PSL) as a conceptual lens for analysing how space and territory are mobilised in the construction of ‘the people’ beyond the national scale. Drawing on two episodes of Turkish engagement with Africa under the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) – the 2011 intervention in Somalia and Turkey’s diplomacy towards Africa following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, respectively –, we demonstrate how disparate places are linked through chains of equivalence and rendered ‘oppressed geographies’ within AKP elites’ geopolitical imagination. This process operates through the construction of antagonistic frontiers between sites of injustice and centres of power. This articulation concurrently serves to naturalise intervention beyond national territorial borders. We argue that PSL structures how populist regimes perceive and engage with the international system, shaping how their elites categorise global space and produce relational hierarchies.