Ozgur Ozkan

Özgür Özkan is a research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School and a visiting scholar at the Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. 

Özkan’s research lies at the nexus of international security and comparative politics with a regional specialization in Turkey and the Middle East. He primarily studies the efficiency and accessibility of security institutions, particularly the military, focusing on organizational culture, social composition, technology, and their implications for authoritarianism and political violence. Özkan is working on a book project based on his dissertation exploring the officer recruitment and promotion patterns and their interaction with international and intrastate conflicts in Turkey since the late Ottoman period.

His current book project draws on extensive fieldwork in Turkey and a uniquely comprehensive dataset of the ethnic backgrounds and career paths of approximately 25,000 officers. Özkan published a book chapter and has several articles in the process of publication on the causes and consequences of the military’s representativeness and effectiveness. His policy-relevant research has appeared in Foreign Policy Magazine and the Conversation.