Dr Karabekir Akkoyunlu

Karabekir convenes the post-graduate modules Methodology in the Social Sciences and State and Transformation in the Middle East, and co-convenes the undergraduate modules Introduction to Comparative Politics and Government and Politics of the Middle East.

Karabekir’s research engages with the literatures on democratisation, autocratisation, hybrid regimes and civil-military relations. His work focuses on political change in hybrid regimes through the interlinkages between societal, institutional and inter/transnational actors and dynamics. Methodologically, he combines in-depth case studies with small-N comparisons and cross-regional analyses; a meso-level approach that can transcend both the risks of parochialism in area studies and the decontextualised universalism of large-N studies, while retaining their valuable insights. Besides Turkey, which features prominently in his academic production as a paradigmatic case (initially) of military tutelage and (subsequently) democratic backsliding, his research has focused on tutelage, democracy and militarism in countries as far apart as Indonesia, Iran and Brazil.

In his forthcoming monograph, Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey: Tutelary Consolidation, Popular Contestation (Edinburgh University Press), Karabekir analyses political change in the two countries through a comparison of their institutions of regime guardianship, the Khomeinist clergy and the Kemalist military. His current research agenda focuses on the limits of autocratisation and the actors and institutions of democratic resistance in countries undergoing democratic erosion, as well as militarism and militarisation at a time of transnational crises.

Before joining SOAS, Karabekir was a lecturer at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil, and a visiting scholar at the International Relations Institute, University of São Paulo, teaching courses on International Development and Middle East Politics and conducting research on militarisation in Brazil. Between 2014 – 2017 he was a post-doctoral research and teaching fellow on Modern Turkey at the Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, Austria. He has a PhD from the Department of Government, London School of Economics (2014), M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge (2008) and a B.A. in History and International Relations from Brown University (2005).

On Google Scholar and Researchgate.

Karabekir is currently not taking PhD students.

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