GLODEM People
GLODEM people are the Center’s most valuable resource. The strength of GLODEM’s membership speaks to its ability to support high-quality, value-added research, activities, and policy analysis.
GLODEM faculty membership is interdisciplinary, enabling the Center to address issues from multiple perspectives and apply the most appropriate skillsets.
As a part of GLODEM’s organizational expansion, its membership will incorporate experts from other universities and research centers, public agencies, private enterprises, and civil society organizations. The resulting diverse membership composition will provide GLODEM with an impressive network of specialists. This network will ensure GLODEM notable breadth and depth of expertise.
GLODEM Director
Caner Bakır
GLODEM Areas of Expertise: Globalization and Democratic Governance
Caner Bakır is a Professor of political science with particular emphasis on international and comparative economy, and public policy and administration of the College of Administrative Sciences and Economics at Koç University. He is the director of the Center for Globalization, Peace and Democratic Governance (GLODEM). He joined Koç University in September 2004 from Monash University where he was an Assistant Lecturer in its Accounting and Finance Department. Prior to this, he worked for Agricultural Bank of Türkiye as a banking specialist.
His qualifications are Bachelor of Public Administration and Politics from the Middle East Technical University, Graduate Diploma in Money, Banking and Finance from Banking School, Master of International Political Economy from the University of Warwick, and a PhD in Politics from Monash University.
Caner’s interdisciplinary & comparative research and teaching interests are in international and comparative political economy, public policy and administration, and international business.
Caner is an associate editor of Policy Sciences, and editorial board member of Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice, Journal of Economic Policy Reform and International Journal of Emerging Markets.
He is the recipient of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK) Incentive Award 2010 and TUBITAK Early Career Researcher Award 2008. He also awarded 25% Salary Market Load (bonus) for “outstanding performance in research and teaching” by the Dean of Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University, 2004.
GLODEM Board Members
Ahmet İçduygu
He currently holds a dual appointment as a full professor at Koç University, one is in the Department of International Relations and the other is in the Department of Sociology. He is also the Director of the Migration Research Center at Koç (MiReKoc). He holds a PhD in Demography from the Australian National University. He is an elected member of the Science Academy in Türkiye. In addition to his own individual research projects, Prof. İçduygu has conducted various research projects for the international organizations such as IOM, UNHCR, EU, OECD and ILO. He teaches on migration studies, theories and practices of citizenship, international organizations, civil society, nationalism and ethnicity, and research methods.
Erdem Yörük
Erdem Yörük is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford. He serves as the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Emerging Welfare” (The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an “Emerging Markets” Welfare State Regime) (emw.ku.edu.tr) and the H2020 project Social Comquant (socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr). He is also a member of Young Academy of Europe and an associate editor of European Review. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University (2012). His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and computational social sciences. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, FP7 Marie Curie CIG, European Research Council StG, ERC PoC, H2020, and the Science Academy of Turkey. His projects have created two datasets on welfare (glow.ku.edu.tr) and protest movements (glocon.ku.edu.tr). His articles have appeared in World Development, Governance, Politics & Society, Journal of European Social Policy, New Left Review, Current Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Communication, Social Policy and Administration, and Social Indicators Research, among others. His book, “The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey” was published by the University of Michigan Press in May 2022.
Merih Angın
Merih Angın is an Assistant Professor of International Relations, and the Founding Director of MA-Computational Social Science Lab at Koç University. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs of Harvard University, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government of the University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar at the Mortara Center for International Studies of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Dr. Angın holds a Ph.D. degree in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), an M.Sc. degree in International Relations from METU, and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Bilkent University. Her research interests lie in the areas of international political economy, international development, international financial institutions, computational social sciences including agent-based modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) governance. Her research on AI usage in social sciences has been awarded the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowship, as well as the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye’s International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers for 3 years.
Burak Gürel
Burak Gürel finished his Ph.D. in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University in 2015. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the co-director of the Center for Asian Studies at Koç University. Gürel is also a supervisor researcher in the Emerging Markets Welfare Project, funded by the European Research Council. Gürel’s scholarly interests include political economy, historical sociology, rural development, social movements, and welfare politics, with a focus on China, India, and Türkiye. He teaches courses on social theory, historical sociology, political sociology, and Asian political economy. Gürel was a Fox International Fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale University in 2006-07 and a visiting researcher at the Center for Rural China Governance at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2012, the Center for Development Studies in Trivandrum, Kerala in 2013, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in 2016, and the International Institute of Social Studies at the Hague in 2019. For more details, please check http://www.burakgurel.com/
GLODEM Non-Resident Visitors
Adrien Abecassis
Adrien Abecassis is a career diplomat with 12+ years of experience advising governments at high level, providing analysis and policy coordination, with a keen interest in innovation and global governance. Served in a variety of key-role in government on European affairs, political strategy, and policy-planning. Proven expertise in managing complex projects across silos. Have written extensively on politics, international governance and diplomacy.
Jack Loveridge
Jack Loveridge is originally from El Paso, Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border. He is a historian of science and technology in the context of international development. He thinks and writes about how states and corporations create tools to measure, manage, and manipulate human populations and the natural world. He is an associate at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.
GLODEM Fulbright Visitor
Sophia McGrath
Sophia McGrath is the GLODEM Center’s Fulbright Visiting Researcher. Her previous work experience includes positions in the U.S. House of Representatives, Texas state legislature, and on multiple U.S. political campaigns. She is a current graduate student at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Her research focuses on elections and democracy through an international security lens.
GLODEM Visiting Doctoral Researcher
Sebahat Derin Atışkan
Sebahat Derin Atiskan is a PhD candidate in Transnational Governance at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Sant Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy. She attained her M.A. in International Relations at Koc University and her B.A. in Political Science at Galatasaray University, with a year abroad at Sciences Po Paris (2014-2015). She was also a visiting PhD researcher at the University of Geneva and the Graduate Institute Geneva, Switzerland (Sept 2020 – April 2021) and a guest researcher at the Global Transformations and Governance Challenges (GTGC) Programme at Leiden University, Netherlands (March-June 2022).
Briefly, her PhD research looks at the transfer of international gender equality norms in domestic contexts. She analyzes the impact of cooperative activities between international organizations (IOs) –mainly the UN agencies– and civil society organizations, specifically international and domestic NGOs, on the formation and the national implementation of Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and CEDAW recommendations related to the women’s human rights. She focuses mainly on the case of Turkiye, and she compares the developments related to the following two issue areas: violence against women and women’s economic rights.