By Mehmet Enes Beşer
Türkiye’s admission as an ASEAN Dialogue Partner on 21 July 2026 has invited a familiar set of questions. How quickly can trade grow? Which sectors can attract investment? What new agreements might follow? These questions matter, but they begin at the wrong end of the relationship. The harder constraint is that too few students, researchers, officials and business professionals on either side know the other well enough to convert diplomatic access into sustained economic activity. For Türkiye and Southeast Asia, the education gap is now more consequential than the trade gap.
Trade can expand for a time without deep social knowledge. Commodity purchases, large contracts and a few well-connected firms may lift the numbers. A broader partnership requires something else: people who can interpret regulations, negotiate across business cultures and identify opportunities before a delegation arrives. A Turkish manufacturer considering Indonesia, Viet Nam or Thailand does not face one “ASEAN market”. It faces different industrial clusters, licensing systems, supplier networks and political economies. The same is true for a Southeast Asian company assessing Türkiye. When expertise is scarce, firms rely on intermediaries, public agencies repeatedly relearn the same lessons and promising ventures stop after their first setback.
The institutional foundations are not entirely absent. The ASEAN–Türkiye Practical Cooperation Areas for 2024–2028 include education, youth development, research, technical and vocational education and training, and exchanges in diplomatic practice. Türkiye also offered an ASEAN joint scholarship programme in 2024. These are useful beginnings. Yet a list of activities and a time-limited, largely one-way scholarship offer do not amount to a two-way knowledge infrastructure. Dialogue Partner status should be used to build that infrastructure, rather than to add another layer of conferences to an already busy diplomatic calendar.
Scholarships alone are insufficient because mobility does not automatically create economically useful networks. ASEAN’s own study of graduate employability and student mobility recommends combining study with placements, internships, career support and structured university–industry collaboration. That lesson applies directly here. Students from ASEAN member states in Türkiye should gain access to companies, organized industrial zones and public institutions, not only classrooms. Turkish students in Southeast Asia need fieldwork, regional languages and experience inside local organizations. Alumni should return to an active professional network with research grants, mentoring and recruitment links.
The first step should be a small portfolio of joint postgraduate programs, designed around real areas of economic cooperation rather than a generic degree in international relations. Universities could jointly teach supply-chain management and industrial policy, public health systems, disaster resilience, agri-food technology or digital governance. Students should study on both sides, receive co-supervision and complete projects for firms or public agencies. The programs should involve the ASEAN University Network and institutions in several member states, not simply pair one university in Ankara with one in Jakarta. Singapore’s financial expertise, Viet Nam’s manufacturing ecosystem and the development priorities of Cambodia or Timor-Leste require different academic partners and different curricula.
A second pillar should connect vocational education directly to production. ASEAN’s education agenda has long prioritized labor-market-responsive TVET and private-sector participation, while current regional initiatives continue to emphasize education–industry partnerships. Türkiye has experience in manufacturing, machinery, textiles, food processing, construction technologies and hospital equipment that can be translated into instructor training and joint certification. But it should not export a standard Turkish template. Partnerships in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia or Viet Nam may focus on advanced manufacturing and supplier upgrading; those in Laos, Cambodia or Timor-Leste may place greater weight on trainer capacity, maintenance skills and small-enterprise productivity. Local demand must determine the course.
The third pillar should bring public administration into the education strategy. Mid-career exchanges between customs authorities, investment agencies, standards bodies, ports and municipal governments would create institutional memory that ministerial visits cannot. Language support should also become reciprocal. Turkish scholarships for Bahasa Indonesia or Malay, Vietnamese and Thai would be as strategically valuable as Turkish-language awards for Southeast Asian students. A network of joint research centers could then maintain country desks, fund fieldwork and publish comparable data on trade barriers, investment and skills demand. A distributed network would be cheaper and more useful than a prestigious new campus with little local reach.
Some will argue that commerce itself will eventually generate the necessary expertise. Large companies do train specialists when the commercial incentive is strong. The problem is that their knowledge often remains proprietary, concentrated in a few sectors and unavailable to smaller firms or government agencies. Education policy creates spillovers: shared terminology, trusted professional networks and a pool of people able to move between universities, business and the state. Japan’s long-running ASEAN–Japan engineering network shows the value of joint supervision, collaborative research and alumni institutions. Türkiye need not copy its scale, but it should copy its patience.
An ASEAN–Türkiye Education and Skills Compact should therefore become an early deliverable of the new Dialogue Partnership. It needs five-year funding, joint governance and business co-financing. The compact should begin with a few pilots: incompatible credit systems, visa procedures and uneven institutional capacity could otherwise turn ambitious targets into another collection of memoranda. Success should not be measured merely by scholarship numbers. The relevant indicators are joint courses completed, internships created, research used by policymakers, graduates recruited into cross-regional roles and regulatory or production problems solved. Funding should reach institutions outside the best-connected capitals and account for the wide differences in capacity among ASEAN members.
Dialogue Partner status gives Türkiye a seat, not a strategy. Trade missions may produce contracts and diplomatic statements may create momentum, but neither can substitute for people who understand how the other side works. Five years from now, the most meaningful test will be whether a Turkish small manufacturer can recruit someone who knows a Southeast Asian supply chain, and whether a public agency in an ASEAN member state can call a Turkish researcher with relevant local experience. If those people do not exist, the partnership will remain ceremonial. If they do, trade will have something durable on which to grow.