From the Editor

FROM THE EDITOR

Owing to its geographical position, the Black Sea is one of the world’s rare basins with distinctive characteristics, having been the stage of countless political, social and cultural movements from the earliest times to the present day. Since antiquity, Rome and the peoples to the north of the Black Sea, later the Turkic states founded in the lands surrounding it, and between the 13th and 20th centuries the Ottoman State and Russia have been among the powers that shaped every kind of event in the region. During the decline of the Ottoman State, and especially after the Black Sea was opened to international shipping and trade in 1774, the lands around the Black Sea became an arena of rivalry among international actors in the 19th century. In this context, the Anglo-Russian struggle for influence in the region deserves particular explanation.

As one of the most important developments in the history of the region, the dissolution of the Ottoman State and the foundation in its place of the unitary Republic of Turkey played a decisive role in securing stability in international relations throughout the 20th century.

With the end of the Cold War, the region is once again being drawn into various struggles for influence. Its international resources discovered at the beginning of the last century, and particularly the desire to carry the energy resources of the Central Asian Turkic states to world markets through the Black Sea basin, place the Black Sea, and therefore Turkey, at the centre of this strategic reality.

The Journal of Black Sea Studies (KİD), which first met its readers with its inaugural issue published in the autumn of 2006, has left a decade behind with the 21 issues it has published regularly to date, and has become an important collection on the Black Sea basin. Covering history-based studies in sociology, anthropology, economics, diplomacy and related fields on the countries and regions of the Black Sea basin, our journal has reached the level of a serious database in this field through the scholarly articles produced on the region by both Turkish and foreign scholars, and has helped to fill a gap in the field.

Published twice a year, in Autumn and Spring, by Serander Publishing House, which was founded in Trabzon in 1999 and has published more than one hundred scholarly works on the Black Sea region, the Journal of Black Sea Studies meets every criterion expected of a scholarly journal and has become a publication that is sought after, followed and cited in the academic community. For a long time it has been an academic periodical indexed by TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM and by a number of national and international indexes.

Undertaking an important task for our region and our country, the Journal of Black Sea Studies also continues its efforts to become one of the reference sources of international information centres concerned with the region. There is no doubt that this will require the support and trust of scholars who conduct, and will conduct, research on the Black Sea basin.

With these feelings and thoughts, we are honoured to meet you with the 36th issue of the Journal of Black Sea Studies, and we kindly ask for your continued contribution and support.

Veysel Usta

Editor