Valley of the Wolves-Iraq: anti-geopolitics Alla Turca

Abstract

This article discusses the Turkish movie Valley of the Wolves-Iraq (Kurtlar Vadisi-Irak), a blockbuster in Turkey in 2006. The movie has made an important mark on the history of Turkish popular culture, not through any artistic achievement, but because of the movie's 'reversed' representations/imaginations. The movie contains favorable views of 'Pax Turca' and 'Pax Islamica' as well as a critique, which is quite anti-American, of the American occupation of Iraq. These images and thus the movie itself give powerful insights into the geopolitical self/other representations of Turks in the current global (dis)order. In addition to these 'reversed' geopolitical representations, the movie reverses (or to be more correct, 'steals') and uses one of the most important soft power tools that Westerners have: cinema and, hence, makes Valley of the Wolves-Iraq a case of double 'anti-geopolitics'. © 2009 Brill.