Çağlar Kurç is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Abdullah Gül University. His research on the arms industries investigates the causes that underlie states’ decisions to embark upon defense industrialization and its implications on the global arms market. He is mainly interested in how the transformation of international arms production practices and emerging technologies affect states’ defense industrialization and arms procurement. In addition to projects, he co-organized the E-Workshop series that aimed to shed empirical light on the defense industrial decision-making process in emerging countries and the political, economic, and military factors that have shaped it.
Dr. Kurç previously worked as an adjunct lecturer at Bilkent, Başkent, and Çankaya universities between 2017 and 2021. He was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research, Ihsan Dogramaci Peace Foundation, between 2018-2019. From 2012 to 2013, He was a Fulbright Fellow at the MIT Security Studies Program. Between 2015 and 2017, he was a Visiting Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. He holds an M.A. in War Studies from King’s College London and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Middle East Technical University, Ankara.
Since September 2023, Dr. Kurç has been overseeing a project conducted jointly between our Center and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and funded by the Center for Advanced Turkey Studies, entitled “National Defence Industry: From an Enabler of Turkey’s Pursuit of Strategic Autonomy to a Bridge between Turkey and Europe.”
