Turkey’s denial of past demographic violence in the region underpins its territorial fiction of an uncontested Anatolian and maritime continuity, while its emerging ‘Blue Homeland’ doctrine extracts contemporary entitlement from that fiction.
These are not parallel state projects. They are the same project, operating in different registers — and one of them is about to become law.
In the coming weeks, the Turkish parliament is expected to take up the Maritime Jurisdiction Areas Law — the legislation that codifies Turkey’s Blue Homeland doctrine.
Presented in May by Ankara University’s National Center for the Sea and Maritime Law (DEHUKAM) and senior figures from the Presidency’s Board of Security and Foreign Policies, the 14-article draft would write into domestic legislation Turkey’s positions on territorial waters, continental shelf, and exclusive economic zone (EEZ) — including the claim that islands do not generate continental shelves on equal terms with mainland territory.
Most observers will read it as the legal codification of an increasingly assertive maritime doctrine. It is also something more consequential: the legislative output of a longer state project that helps constitute the legitimacy environment within which such revisionism becomes governable, teachable, and legally codifiable.
