Özgür Özkan

  I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Bates College and a Faculty Affiliate at Harvard Kennedy School. Before joining Bates I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a Visiting Scholar at the Russia and Eurasia Program at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I hold a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a master’s degree in Regional Security Studies (Europe-Eurasia) from the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. 

My research and teaching lie at the intersection of international security and comparative politics, focusing on governance, security, and society. I investigate the drivers and political outcomes of the military's accessibility and efficiency.  I also study international security cooperation, with a focus on military aid and its professional and political implications for contributor and recipient countries. In my research, I adopt a comparative historical perspective using qualitative and quantitative methods. My scholarship engages with the literatures on civil-military relations, security cooperation, democratization, and authoritarianism.  

I am currently preparing a book manuscript based on my dissertation that offers the first systematic study of the causes and consequences of merit and representation in the military. It explores the ethnic and geographical representation patterns in the officer corps, focusing on the case of Turkey (and Ottoman Empire) between 1848 and 2015. My book aims to understand how officer recruitment and promotion patterns originate and evolve, and specifically how they respond to regime changes and major political shocks, specifically international war, ethnic conflict, and coup d'ètat. I identify two organizational and social mechanisms specific to the military that moderate the impact of threats and related inter-ethnic tensions prevalent in society, thus contributing to the persistence of officer demographics: (1) local recruitment networks and (2) an autonomous promotion regime. My findings reveal that the ethnic and geographical composition of Turkey’s officer corps can be traced back to the late Ottoman period when modern military institutions were established. Despite various military coups, ethnic rebellions, and multiple wars throughout the twentieth century, I find that these patterns have remained largely consistent owing to the officer corps’ deep-seated direct ties with local populations and long-established professionalism. For instance, my findings unearth that, since the late nineteenth century, Kurds have steadily enjoyed some degree of representation in Turkey’s military elite, albeit imperfect, despite major external threats and persistent interethnic tensions in the society. My book challenges conventional wisdom about the influence of threats on institutions by elucidating the moderation effect of social networks and organizational structure and processes. 

My dissertation and other related ongoing projects draw on extensive fieldwork in Turkey between 2016 and 2019, during which I collected archival data to construct two original datasets of the ethnic-geographic backgrounds and career paths of all Turkish general staff officers (n= 23,450) since the mid-nineteenth century and held 146 in-depth interviews with military officers, academics, journalists, and politicians.

You can read my up-to-date CV here.

Please feel free to contact me for inquiries related to my work at oozkan@bates.edu or using the messaging tool above