The Turkish Straits are one of the most significant waterways in the world. The straits serve as a link between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, connecting Europe and Asia. The Straits have been a crucial passage for trade and commerce for centuries. However, their strategic location also makes them a potential chokepoint in times of war or conflict. The legal and political status of the Turkish Straits has been a subject of concern for many countries, especially those that rely on these waterways for their trade and security. In an attempt to regulate the legal and political status of the Turkish Straits, which has been a topic of discussion and debate for many years, international treaties and agreements have been used to establish an agreed regime among states. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the legal and political status of the Turkish Straits. The book analyzes the various international treaties and conventions that regulate the use of the straits and their implications for the parties involved.

Suppose one were given the task of mapping the general circulation in an unfamiliar ocean. The ocean, like our own, is subdivided into basins and marginal seas interconnected by sea straits. Assuming a limited budget for this undertaking, one would do well to choose the straits as observational starting points. To begin with, the currents flowing from one basin to the next, over possibly wide and time-varying paths, are confined to narrow and stable routes within the straits. Mass, heat and chemical budgets for individual basins can be formulated in terms of the fluxes measured across the straits using a relatively small number of instruments. The confinement of the flow by a strait can also give rise to profound dynamical conse quences including choking or hydraulic control, a process similar to that by which a dam regulates the flow from a reservoir. The funneling geometry can lead to enhanced tidal modulation and increased velocities, giving rise to local instabilities, mixing, internal bores, jumps, and other striking hydraulic and fine scale phenomena. In short, sea straits repre sent choke points which are observationally and dynamically strategic and which contain a full range of fascinating physical processes.

This publication shows that the Eastern Mediterranean, having been transformed from a region of secondary importance during the Cold War to one of greater importance for the western interests in the post-Cold War era, is in a state of flux. Despite sporadic periods of rapprochement, tensions between Greece and Turkey still exist. Therefore, one must question the grounds behind the lack of normal relations that exist between these two NATO members and its effects on the NATO organisation as a whole. Hence, this volume has two purposes first, to examine Greek and Turkish foreign, security and defence policies during and after the post-Cold War period and second, to investigate why these policies have been formulated.

This is the thirteenth book in the series International Straits of the World initiated and edited at the Graduate College of Marine Studies of the University of Delaware. In 1987 the ninth book in this series dealt with the Turkish Straits. Since then, however, the rapid developments of the law of the sea, especially with regard to coastal state jurisdiction and the status of international straits, has called for a new analysis of the heavily-trafficked, narrow waterway that links the Mediterranean Sea with the Black Sea. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea provided a special regime for straits used for international navigation. [...Nothing in this part of the convention, however, affected the legal regime of the Turkish Straits. The convention exempted those straits in which passage was regulated in whole or in part by long-standing international conventions specifically related to that strait. The Montreux Convention of 1936, still in force, was designed to regulate passage through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus - or the Turkish Straits. Dr. Ünlü has addressed a key international policy question, namely, in the light of the evolving law of the sea and the special role of the International Maritime Organization, should the 1936 Montreux Convention be amended or denounced - or changed by some unilateral act of Turkey.[...] In sum, can the convention be sustained as it is, modified by unilateral action, denounced by the parties, or its provisions changed in some other way by international action? The author has even explored the possibility of making the straits a particularly sensitive sea area, allowing the coastal state to take expanded jurisdiction to prevent marine pollution. Dr. Ünlü has done a great service to scholarship on the legal regime of the Turkish Straits. She has left her readers with policy options that will be useful in trying to reconcile the use of a strait not covered by the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention with the exigencies of modern international law.

This book presents the ups and downs of the Soviet-Turkish relations during World War II and immediately after it. Hasanli draws on declassified archive documents from the United States, Russia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan to recreate a true picture of the time when the 'Turkish crisis' of the Cold War broke out. It explains why and how the friendly relations between the USSR and Turkey escalated into enmity, led to the increased confrontation between these two countries, and ended up with Turkey's entry into NATO. Hasanli uses recently-released Soviet archive documents to shed light on some dark points of the Cold War era and the relations between the Soviets and the West. Apart from bringing in an original point of view regarding starting of the Cold War, the book reveals some secret sides of the Soviet domestic and foreign policies. The book convincingly demonstrates how Soviet political technologists led by Josef Stalin distorted the picture of a friendly and peaceful country_Turkey_into the image of an enemy in the minds of millions of Soviet citizens.