Ever since the European Union (EU) embraced a securitising approach to the migration problem by leaning on third-country deals, countries such as Turkey and Belarus gained leverage against the EU,...Show moreEver since the European Union (EU) embraced a securitising approach to the migration problem by leaning on third-country deals, countries such as Turkey and Belarus gained leverage against the EU, using these deals as tools for coercive engineered migration (CEM). Although Turkey has been a candidate country and was following a Europeanising route for its policies, it opted for a coercive route and employed CEM against the EU after the 2015 crisis. Based on Greenhill’s (2010) theory, this paper argues that Turkey has employed CEM because it had certain demands from the EU that were previously unacceptable and had lower bargaining power vis-à-vis the EU. This project followed a process-tracing method and analysed five cases where Turkey employed CEM against the EU. The analysis showed that in all of these five cases, Turkey had certain demands from the EU, whether political, monetary, or otherwise, that were not negotiable by the EU before this strategy. Although Turkey was not always successful in retrieving its demands from the EU, it managed to at least put the demands on the negotiation table. Secondly, in all of the cases, Turkey had lower bargaining power compared to the EU, which made it likely for Turkey to employ CEM to shift the power balance. The analysis adds nuance to the research on coercive migration diplomacy by focusing on the Turkish case, particularly observing Turkey's shift from a cooperative to a coercive power and examining the causal mechanisms behind this shift. This research might encourage further studies that compare Turkey to different third-country deals on this basis.Show less