Professor of Political Science and International Relations
Welcome to Murat Somer’s Homepage
Polarization, Depolarization, Democratic Remaking and Peace
Murat Somer is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ozyegin University, Istanbul, and an expert on comparative polarization, democratization and depolarization; democratic erosion, recovery, and opposition behaviour; religious and secular politics and ethnic conflicts including the Kurdish Question; and Turkish politics and foreign policy.
One strand of his research and writings investigates comparative polarization, depolarization, and democratization. By distinguishing between harmful and constructive versions of polarization and polarizing politics, he and Jennifer McCoy developed the concepts of pernicious polarization, transformative repolarization and active and passive strategies of depolarization. His forthcoming book, How to Depolarize: Remaking the World’s Democracies in the Twenty-First Century (with J. McCoy, Princeton University Press) puts forward a theory of how contemporary democracies can overcome pernicious polarization and democratic backsliding.
Another strand of his work examines democratic erosion and how democracy defenders, democratic oppositions in particular can overcome it. He highlights how democratic erosion is an interactive process that results from the actions, inactions and reactions of both pro-autocracy and pro-democracy actors. In joint work with J. McCoy, he conceptualized the peculiar uncertainties (regime uncertainty) that arise during democratic backsliding and the trade-offs that emerge between normal and extraordinary political strategies. They argue that democratic erosion weakens the defenders of democracy by dividing opposition actors into alarmists, cautioners and strategic alarmists.
A third strand of Somer’s research studies ethnic, religious and secular dimensions of politics and conflict. He investigates nation-states and state-nations, the links between secularism, democracy and “development”. He argued that polarized and antagonistic ethnic identities in places like ex-Yugoslavia and Turkey are often products rather than causes of ethnic conflicts. He maintained that Islamist politics in Turkey and elsewhere can reconcile with democracy only if checked and balanced by strong secular institutions and political rivals, and Turkey’s Kurdish Question cannot be fully resolved without understanding and addressing the related dilemmas of post-imperial, Turkish nation-state formation.
Before joining Ozyegin University, he served as Assistant, Associate and Full Professor at Koç University, Istanbul, and held visiting appointments such as Democracy and Development fellow at Princeton University, Senior Visiting Scholar at Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar and lecturer in the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University.
He is a member of the international Democratic Erosion cross-university research and teaching collaboration at Brown University, and of the Advisory Group for the Global Initiative on Polarization and Depolarization Community of Practice of the Institute for Integrated Transitions based in Barcelona, Spain. He has been an active volunteer, participant and informal advisor for civil society and political parties on issues related to democracy, polarization and rule of law in Turkey. He has been a frequent contributor to Turkish and international media including CNN International, Washington Post, New York Times, Euronews and Deutsche Welle.
Somer teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Comparative Politics, International Political Economy, Authoritarianism and Democracy in the 21st Century, Religion and Secularism in the World, and History and Politics of Modern Turkey.
A former Mellon post-doctoral fellow on modern ethnic conflicts at the University of Washington in Seattle, Murat Somer holds a BA in Economics from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and an MA in Economics and a PhD in Political Economy and Public Policy from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Contact: Özyeğin University, Faculty of Social Sciences Nişantepe Mah. Çekmeköy, 34794 Istanbul Turkiye Ozyegin University Office: Social Sciences Bldg AB2 274 E-mail: murat.somer@ozyegin.edu.tr ; murat.somer4@gmail.com
