Kerem Oktem

Kerem Öktem is Open Society Research Fellow at the European Studies Centre and an Associate Faculty Member at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford. He obtained his D. Phil. on the interaction of nation-building and spatial policies from Oxford's School of Geography in 2006 and an M. St. in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the Oriental Institute in 2001.

His research focuses on Turkey’s politics and international relations with a particular focus on minorities and nationalism, and on Muslim politics and networks in the Balkans and Western Europe. He has published in Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Muslims in Europe, Journal of Southeast European Studies, Multicultural Discourses, European Journal of Turkish Studies, and Patterns of Prejudice (forthcoming 2013). He regularly comments on current affairs in MERIP, OpenDemocracy and more recently in Al Arabiya.

Dr Öktem is the author of Angry Nation. Turkey since 1989 (Zed, 2011), which was also published in Arabic as Al Umma al Ghadiba (Soutour Publishers, Cairo, 2012) [http://keremoktem.com/books/angry-nation]

He is co- or lead editor of the following books:

Another Empire? A decade of Turkey’s Foreign Policy under The Justice and Development Party (Bilgi University Press, 2012) with Ayşe Kadioğlu [http://anotherempire.info]

Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity. Conflict and Change in the 20^th Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) with Celia Kerslake and Philip Robins [http://www.turkishpolicy.com/images/stories/2010-01-tpq/127-135.pdf]

In the long Shadow of Europe. Greeks and Turks in the Era of Postnationalism (Brill, 2009) with Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Othon Anastasakis.

His latest SEESOX booklet on Turkey is a co-edited essay on Turkey’s changing foreign policy logics: The Western Condition. Turkey, the US and the EU in the new Middle East (SEESOX, 2013) [http://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/seesox/publications/TheWesternCondition.pdf ]

Dr Öktem was recently been elected to the Editorial Board of Kurdish Studies and Mülkiye Dergisi, the journal of the Political Science Faculty of Ankara University. He is a member of the Middle East Studies Association the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and the British Institute in Ankara.

Current Research

Dr Öktem currently works on two interrelated research projects on the politics of Muslims. The first on ‘Europe’s Muslim Neighbour­hoods’ deals with the politics of Muslim immigrants and their relations with Muslim majority countries in Europe’s neighbourhood, as part of a wider research project on freedom and Diversity at the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom at St Antony’s College. The second is the Open Society Foundation funded research initiative on the ‘Signals from the majority’ in Germany. As principal investigator, and together with a research team based in Berlin and at the European University at Frankfurt/Oder, he seeks to elucidate the impact of exclusivist state action and discriminatory public debate on the sense of security and the ability to integrate among Muslims and Jews.

The second axis of his research work deals with Turkey and its changing environment after the Arab uprisings. Included in this axis are a cooperation with Reem Abou El-Fadl (DPIR) on Turkish-Egyptian relations after the revolution (with contribution to an edited volume in 2014) and a research collaboration with Sossie Kasbarian (University of Lancaster) on the (micro-politics) of Turkish – Armenian reconciliation, which will also be published as part of a special issue of the Journal Patterns of Prejudice.