PhD Topic/Title: Turkey's EU membership candidacy: at crossroads between transformational leadership, domestic politics and international dynamics from 2002 to 2019.
There is a consensus in the literature of EU-Turkey relations that Turkey has been an 'unusual' candidate. This atypicality is related to the problematic Europeanization of the country, political polarization (after 2007), populism (after 2010) and the rise of authoritarianism under the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, heretofore AKP) rule (especially after 2015). Based on this assumption the literature suggests that the leader of AKP is the main decision-maker of Turkey's foreign policy. This research aims to test this assumption in order to explain the changes in Turkey's foreign policy towards the EU from 2002 until 2019. The added value of the research will be the examination of the interactions between Erdogan's transformational leadership, AKP-dominated domestic politics, and international dynamics. All these factors contributed to the changes in Turkish foreign policy towards the EU in this timespan.
Academic biography
- 2015-2016: M.A. in International Relations, University of Sussex, UK.
- 2012-2015: M.A. in European Studies, Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey.
- 2005-2009: Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations, Adnan Menderes University, Turkey.
4th International Student Congress, April 24-25, 2017, Manisa-TURKEY.
Western Balkans in the European Union’s Enlargement Policy: A Content Analysis.
- Canveren, Ö , Öztürk, Ç . (2018). ‘Legitimization in European Union’s Enlargement Policies: A Comparative Analysis between Central and Eastern European Countries and the Western Balkans’, Adnan Menderes University Journal of Social Sciences Institute, 2018, 5 (1), pp.46-64