Introduction: Re-Mapping Turkish Power and Religious Policies in the Western Balkans

The contributions collected here propose a shift away from viewing Turkey’s presence in Southeast Europe primarily through the lenses of soft power or neo-Ottoman revivalism. Instead, they advance a set of complementary approaches that foreground materiality, infrastructure, institutional practice, and symbolic world-making. Central to this reframing is the concept of an imperial gaze, understood not primarily as a claim to territorial control but as a mode of seeing and ordering space through which Ankara’s political and religious elites imagine, aestheticise, and render legible a hierarchically structured civilisational geography. This gaze operates through monumental religious architecture, heritage restoration, bureaucratic standardisation, and ceremonial performance, flattening historical complexity while producing powerful symbols of continuity and belonging