Turkey’s TV celebrities as cultural envoys: the role of celebrity diplomacy in nation branding and the pursuit of soft power

ABSTRACT

With the increasing popularity of Turkish television dramas, actors from Turkish TV series have become global celebrities with hundreds of millions of fans worldwide. In this paper, drawing on a political economy of communication analysis, we investigate the ways in which the Turkish government utilizes Turkish TV series’ actors’ celebrity status to further its foreign policy agenda with respect to soft power. We argue that in the Turkish case, celebrity diplomacy or the instrumentalization of celebrities for state ambitions of soft power necessitates a reliance on commercial television exports for nation branding. This brings its own contradictions and consequences as the image and meaning desired by the Turkish government does not always align with what the TV industry creates when competing in the global TV marketplace.

KEYWORDS:

• Turkish television series
• soft power
• nation branding
• celebrity diplomacy
• transnationalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ece Algan

Ece Algan is a professor of Communication Studies at California State University, San Bernardino. Her latest research addresses the interplay between cultural politics and creative industries in Turkey. She has written on the subjects of transnational television, activist journalism, ethnic broadcasting and gender in several media and communication journals and edited collections, including her co-edited collection Television in Turkey: Domestic Production, Transnational Expansion and Political Aspirations (2020) with Yesim Kaptan. Her previous publications feature the findings of her longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork research on local radio, emerging communication technologies and youth.

Yeşim Kaptan

Yeşim Kaptan is an assistant professor at the School of Communication Studies at Kent State University in Ohio. Previously, Dr. Kaptan was a faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and a visiting scholar at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Cultural Studies and Media Dialogues: Journal for Research of the Media and Society. She is the co-editor of Television in Turkey: Local Production, Transnational Expansion and Political Aspirations. Her research on global communication, transnational media, and consumer culture has been published in the International Journal of Communication, Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, the Journal of Consumer Culture, The Global Media Journal, as well as various English and Turkish media journals and books.