By Bosphorus News Research Desk
Study: Beyond the handshake: persistent confrontation in Turkish-Greek diplomatic discourse after the 2016 coup
Institution: Kobe University, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies; Koç University, Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Political Science and International Relations
Date: September 23, 2026
Region / File: Türkiye-Greece / Eastern Mediterranean diplomacy and official discourse
Research note: A quantitative study of Turkish Foreign Ministry statements finds that the 2023 thaw with Greece softened official rhetoric only partially. During the period studied, the tone remained more confrontational than before July 2016.
Lungta Seki analyzes 5,941 English-language statements and press releases issued by Türkiye's Foreign Ministry from January 2007 to October 2024. The material is divided into 26,839 paragraphs. Greece-related passages are measured with Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS), followed by period-based regression analysis.
The study finds a statistically significant rise in confrontational language after the failed coup attempt of July 2016. The score rises further during the Eastern Mediterranean crisis, reaching its highest levels during periods of active escalation and military standoff.
By the rapprochement period beginning in December 2023, the score had fallen from the crisis peak. It still remained above the pre-2016 baseline and close to the preceding détente period.
Seki tests the result across 60 alternative specifications. A hand-coded validation sample produced a Krippendorff's α of 0.792. Model predictions correlated with adjudicated human scores at r=0.447, p<.001.
Strategic relevance: The study separates high-level political diplomacy from the language produced by the foreign-policy bureaucracy. In the Türkiye-Greece file, the comparison is useful because the 2023 earthquake diplomacy and Athens Declaration lowered political tensions without resolving the disputes beneath them.
Maritime jurisdiction, sovereignty, security and legal claims remained part of official exchanges. The paper finds that the diplomatic thaw did not immediately remove that vocabulary from Turkish Foreign Ministry communications.
The dataset ends in October 2024. It cannot establish whether the pattern continued through 2025 and 2026. It also covers only English-language Turkish Foreign Ministry material. Greek Foreign Ministry rhetoric, Turkish-language statements, private diplomacy and internal deliberations fall outside the study.
Bosphorus News reading: The paper does not measure whether the Türkiye-Greece rapprochement succeeded or failed. It measures public diplomatic language.
On that narrower question, its finding is clear. The improvement after 2023 did not return Turkish Foreign Ministry rhetoric to its pre-2016 level during the period observed.
A useful next step would be to extend the Turkish dataset through 2025 and 2026 and build a parallel corpus from the Greek Foreign Ministry. That comparison could establish whether the persistence identified by Seki was temporary, concentrated on one side or present across the bilateral relationship.
Read the study: Beyond the handshake: persistent confrontation in Turkish-Greek diplomatic discourse after the 2016 coup
Sources: Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer Nature, Bosphorus News review and reporting.