Özgür Özkan

  I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I previously held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center and as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Bates College. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle.

My research focuses on how states organize and control their coercive institutions, and how these practices shape, and are shaped by,  civil conflict, authoritarian politics, regime change, and international security cooperation. With a regional specialization in Turkey and the Middle East, I study how states manage competence, political loyalty, and ethnic diversity within their military institutions, and why some armies remain cohesive, while others fracture under the strain of war, ethnic conflict, and regime transition. I also examine how foreign military training shapes officers’ professionalism and political attitudes. My work combines comparative historical analysis with large-N individual and subnational datasets, archival research, interviews, and surveys.

My book manuscript, The Multiethnic Army: Origins and Resilience, asks why states continue to recruit officers from communities that revolt against them, and why those officers remain loyal even when deployed to suppress those uprisings. I argue that local recruitment networks create durable pathways into the officer corps, while autonomy over promotions allows officers to advance on the basis of performance. Together, these practices sustain ethnic representation and officers’ loyalty to the institution across war, insurgency, and regime change. I test this argument using three original datasets covering approximately 25,000 officer careers in the Ottoman and Turkish armies from 1848 to 2013, alongside archival research and more than 100 interviews with retired officers and politicians. I find that prior recruitment patterns help explain subsequent ethnic representation in the officer corps, and that academic performance is the most consistent predictor of promotion to general officer ranks. Arab, Albanian, and Kurdish officers rarely defected when members of their communities rebelled against the Ottoman and Turkish states; many instead led campaigns to quell those rebellions. The book challenges the expectation that ethnic conflict fragments multiethnic armies. It shows instead how military institutions can moderate societal divisions and sustain loyalty even amid prolonged ethnic violence.

 I have several related projects extending the book’s institutional argument. An article drawn from the book, currently under review, examines Kurdish officers’ continued representation and loyalty during Kurdish insurgencies and extensive state repression. I also published a book chapter, available in English and Turkish, on Jewish representation in the Ottoman army during the Balkan Wars and World War I. A working paper shows how institutionalized promotion systems constrain regime personalization and help explain the limited durability of military rule—a finding that applies well beyond Turkey. Another working paper focuses on the impact of using pro-government militias as coethnic counterinsurgents on state building and conflict outcomes. 

A second strand of my research examines how foreign military training shapes recipient militaries and their political ties. I am co-leading a multiyear project on U.S. military training in Turkey and Tunisia, supported by a federal grant. In a recently completed a paper, I examine the demand side of foreign military training, showing how internal threats and shifts in educational policy shape decisions to send officers abroad. 

My public writing has appeared in Foreign Policy and The Conversation, and I have given public talks at Harvard, UW, and Tufts.

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

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