Burak Akçapar (born May 27, 1967, Istanbul) is a Turkish diplomat, scholar, and author currently serving as Turkey's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office at Geneva.
During his tenure at NATO, as Facilitator of the Southeast Europe Security Assistance Group, he led the efforts to promote regional cooperation among Balkan countries.
Achievements included the Southeast Europe Common Assessment Paper on Regional Security Challenges and Opportunities (SEECAP) adopted by Ministers in Budapest on 29 May 2001.
His book Turkey's New European Era: Foreign Policy on the Road to EU Membership received praise:[18] "This is a thought-provoking study by a Turkish diplomat with well-marshaled arguments.
Akçapar provides the best and most up-to-date study of the benefits that Turkey offers European Union countries for gaining full membership in the EU.
Well written and argued, this book makes clear the growing importance of Turkey as a political player on the global stage, especially in the Middle East.
"—Choice "Turkey's bid for membership in the European Union could be one of the most important geopolitical events of the next few decades, with profound consequences for Europe's identity, the security and politics of Eurasia and the Middle East, and the debate about democracy in Muslim countries.
Akcapar's is the fresh and powerful voice of a younger generation of strategic thinkers in a country whose importance is destined to grow in the years ahead.
Among them, the one organized by Mohammad Ali Jauhar and directed by Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari caught the limelight, thanks to the regular letters sent home by the director of the Mission and published in the weekly Comrade journal.
In the body of scholarship on Ottoman pan-Islamism, as a manifestation of pan-Islamist political ideology and Muslim internationalist action and its influence on the 1919 Khilafat Movement in India, the 1912-13 Indian Medical Mission has not been analysed in detail.
[11] The book also presents a compelling case for the Ottoman Empire - something that has not been done too frequently, where he tries to correct a perceived historic wrong: the portrayal of Turks as despots in Western historiography.
In a bid to maintain and indeed improve its character as an obligatory and objectified set of norms, principles and procedures governing all facets of the states of peace and war, international law responds to this challenge basically on two fronts.
Thus, new types of sources of obligation and methods for creating them make their debut and take their place in the international legal order alongside the more traditional ones.
This points out to a shift of emphasis from grandiose global codification efforts to more promising and less indolent regional arrangements.” Against this background, he argued that "the bountiful miscellany of arms control agreements provide a vast resource, for monitoring all the above courses of development in international law.
Arms control in general provides an original perspective into national security policy emphasizing cooperation and multilateralism in place of unconditional competition.
Akçapar argued that arms control processes constitute one of the methods by which States seek to attain and strengthen minimum international public order.
The central jurisprudential theme of this study adopts this perspective and investigates the role of -and interactions with- the institutions and mechanisms of general international law in the negotiation, operation, verification and enforcement of arms control agreements.
International law after more than four centuries of systematized experience cannot claim to have found an effective and consistently reliable anti-dote against determined aggressors or violators ultimately outside that of self-help.
Arms control negotiations and agreements mitigate the insecurity in which the States in the world arena find themselves as a result of this ultimately individual responsibility to self-preservation.
The perceived contradiction between progress and stability is avoidable and can be overcome by sound and consistent policy and adherence to fundamental international norms by both the regional and extra-regional powers.
The authors believed that the Turkish experience in the process of adoption and harmonization to the Copenhagen political criteria of the European Union is a case that successfully portrays this method.