After the Deluge: Comparative Politics of the Coronavirus Pandemic
(TRT World) If we take March 12th, the day the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak to be a pandemic, we have entered the second month of…
Posts by author
Şener Aktürk
20 posts
Associate Professor, Department of International Relations
Affiliation
Koç University, Istanbul
Links
Expertise
Comparative Politics, Ethnic Politics, Institutions, Nationalism, Religion, Germany, Russia, Turkey
The puzzle of Turkish minority representation, nationhood cleavage, and politics of recognition in Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia
(Mediterranean Politics) Abstract: Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia have demographically the largest and politically the most significant Turkish minorities in southeastern Europe. Yet the official recognition of Turkish ethnicity and language…
Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring and the Battle for a Free Syria
(TRT World) Operation Peace Spring, which was launched in October 2019, has been in the making for more than four years. By mid-2015, the YPG-PYD’s expanding occupation of the mostly…
Comparative Politics of Exclusion in Europe and the Americas: Religious, Sectarian, and Racial Boundary Making since the Reformation
(Comparative Politics) Based on a critical reading of three recent books, I argue that the exclusion of Jews and Muslims, the two major non-Christian religious groups in Europe and the Americas,…
Five Faces of Russia’s Soft Power: Far Left, Far Right, Orthodox Christian, Russophone, and Ethnoreligious Networks
(PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo) Does Russia exercise true “soft power”—the power of attraction—in any significant measure? Scholars like Joseph Nye, who first conceptualized the notion of soft power, argue that the…
Turkey’s Border Security: Interview with Şener Aktürk
(TRT) Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Koc University Şener Aktürk discusses operations in Syria, new US policies, the PYD-YPG as an armed ideological minority within an ethnic minority,…
INTL 375—Eurasia: Politics and Society since 1914
Syllabus attached Document: INTL 375 Syllabus Fall 2017 Finalized.pdf
What does the KRG referendum mean for Arabs, Turks, and Middle East?
(Anadolu Agency) The significance of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s unilateral decision to hold a referendum for secession from Iraq cannot be overstated. Both the arguments in favor of and against the…
Turkey’s Role in the Arab Spring and the Syrian Conflict
(Turkish Policy Quarterly) Turkish involvement in the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war began at a time when Turkey’s impressive record of democratic progress and economic growth in the 2000s…
Sino-Soviet Split Redux under President Trump?
(The New Turkey) Perhaps the most important geopolitical puzzle since the collapse of the Soviet Union 25 years ago has been whether the United States will reorient its grand strategy to…