Güneş Murat Tezcür (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2005) is the Director of the School of Politics and Global Studies at the Arizona State University. He is a scholar of comparative politics who explores the trajectories of political violence and politics of identity across the globe with a focus on Iranian, Kurdish, Turkish, and American human geography. He has a deep commitment to the transformative impact higher-education institutions have on the betterment of human life in an increasingly precarious world.
His scholarship has appeared in leading scholarly journals including American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Development and Change, Journal of Peace Research, Law & Society Review, Perspectives on Politics, Politics & Gender among many others. His most recent book is Liminal Minorities: Religion and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies (Cornell University Press, 2024) that received the International Studies Association’s Religion and International Relations Book Award, Hubert Morken Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association Religion and Politics Section, and American Political Science Association Middle East and North Africa Section Best Book Award by a Senior Scholar. He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Kurds and Yezidis in the Middle East: Shifting Identities, Borders, and the Experience of Minority Communities (I.B. Tauris, 2021).