Ozgur Ozkan

Ozgur Ozkan is a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle and an M.A. in Regional Security Studies (Russia-Eurasia) from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Before pursuing an academic career, he served as an officer in the Turkish army and NATO. Ozgur’s research lies at the nexus of international security and comparative politics. He primarily studies the efficiency and accessibility of security institutions, particularly the military, focusing on organizational culture, social composition, technology, and their implications for authoritarianism and political violence. Ozgur is working on a book project based on his dissertation exploring the determinants of the officer corps’ ethnic and geographical composition and its persistence in Turkey since the late Ottoman period. His book draws on extensive fieldwork in Turkey and a uniquely comprehensive dataset of the ethnic backgrounds and career paths of approximately 25,000 officers. Ozgur published a book chapter and has several articles in the process of publication on the causes and consequences of the military’s representativeness and effectiveness. His public-facing research appeared in Foreign Policy Magazine.