Performing civilizational statehood: neo-Ottoman Islamism and Imperial Japan’s GEACPS in comparative perspective

This article develops a five-stage model of civilizational statehood to explain how actors in a stratified international system pursue status under conditions of material asymmetry and persistent non-recognition. The framework conceptualizes civilizational claims as sequential performances and examines how states mobilize symbolic repertoires to compensate for withheld recognition. Through a comparative analysis of Imperial Japan and AKP-era Turkey, the study demonstrates how structural subordination generates civilizational aspiration that manifests through claims to centrality and moral vocabularies of justice. However, the findings reveal that these ambitions rarely translate into durable authority. The analysis contrasts Imperial Japan’s rupture-oriented and coercive regional project, which collapsed under material overextension, with AKP-era Turkey’s hybrid and negotiated variant, constrained by economic fragility and geopolitical dependence. Collectively, the cases uncover a central paradox: civilizational projects born from constraint struggle to transcend the very structural conditions that produce them.