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This book is derived from my master´s thesis, which I wrote at the University of Vienna under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Friedrich Edelmayer. I am proud that I chose to focus on one of the understandably long-neglected priorities of Turkish foreign policy. Given that we currently observe a number of (super)powers as well as regions (re-)emerging, one can assume that the global politics of the Black Sea as well as the meaning of Romania-Ukraine relations will be of greater importance in the nearest future. As a young political scientist from Istanbul, a coastal city to the Black Sea, I present this work with the modest hope that it represents at least a tiny contribution to the field of Black Sea studies. I would like to thank Professor Edelmayer for his generous supervision, Leopold Kögler and Markus Gatschnegg, who made many impossibles possible, my previous professors Ester Ruben, Fuat Aksu, €igdem Nas and Asli Daldal, who shaped my way of thinking, Ms. Kirsten Lühmann, who gave me permission to keep working on my research whilst interning at German Bundestag, and most importantly, my mother and father, who provided me with an irreplacable kind of support.

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Ünveren, Burak
The author was born in Istanbul in 1989. After graduating from St. George´s Austrian High School, he studied Political Science and International Relations at Yildiz Technical University and Global Studies at the Universities of Leipzig and Vienna. He completed the IPS programme at the German Bundestag and currently works at Deutsche Welle.

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