Polarization, Depolarization, Democratic Remaking and Peace

Murat Somer is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ozyegin University, Istanbul. A scholar of comparative politics concerned about questions of peaceful, democratic and equitable development, his research focuses on comparative polarization, democratization and depolarization, democratic erosion, opposition behaviour, religious and secular politics, ethnic conflicts and the Kurdish Question. His recent publications include Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy, (co-edited with Jennifer McCoy, 2019) and Return to Point Zero: The Turkish-Kurdish Question and How Politics and Ideas (Re-)Make Empires, Nations and States (2022). He is currently working on two monographs (with Jennifer McCoy), on how democracies can overcome polarization and democratic erosion.

Before joining Ozyegin, 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 Research Group on De- and Re-Democratization (DRD) at Central European University, Hungary, and the international Democratic Erosion cross-university research and teaching collaboration at Brown University. He has been an active volunteer, participant and advisor for civil society and political parties on issues related to democracy, polarization and rule of law in Turkey, and a frequent contributor to domestic and international media including CNN International, Washington Post, New York Times, Euronews and Deutsche Welle.

Somer teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Comparative Politics, Political Economy, Authoritarianism and Democracy in the 21^st 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
Ph. +90-216-564-9504
E-mail: murat.somer@ozyegin.edu.tr ;
murat.somer4@gmail.com