Instrumental geopolitical realism and the clashing soft powers: why transatlantic security imperatives limit Turkey’s influence in Kosovo

This article proposes the theory of instrumental geopolitical realism, a framework of citizen-level geopolitical reasoning explaining how public opinion on foreign actors is conditioned in environments of acute, existential security dependence. While standard public diplomacy literature assumes that shared cultural and religious affinities naturally foster geopolitical alignment, our framework argues that under severe hard-security asymmetries, target populations act as rational security maximisers, systematically prioritising relations with the primary hegemon that guarantees their statehood and physical survival. We test this theory using a randomised survey experiment in Kosovo, a Muslim-majority state whose security is guaranteed by the US and the EU, while subject to intensive cultural and religious outreach from Turkey’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy. Our results show that evaluations of US civic engagement function as an unconditional structural constant, completely insulated from demographic and religious variation. Conversely, Turkish soft power is highly reactive and conditional, collapsing among secular citizens and reaching parity with Western actors only among the most devout. These findings confirm the core tenet of instrumental geopolitical realism: in contested post-conflict theatres, citizen-level soft power reception is structurally subservient to the hard-power imperatives of state survival, demonstrating that cultural attraction ends precisely where security guarantees begin.