‘Biden's US and Erdoğan's Turkey’ – experts Cengiz Çandar and Dr. Ayşe Zarakol to discuss

The recent election victory of Joe Biden as President of the United States of America is expected to usher in many foreign policy changes for the US. One of the most important areas will be how the Biden Administration chooses to deal with Turkey, and how its President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may respond in turn. There are already serious fractures between these two allies, which President Trump has managed to pave over during his term at the White Office. Renowned Turkish journalist Cengiz Çandar and Dr Ayşe Zarakol, a Reader of International Relations at Cambridge University, will examine how bi-lateral relations between the US and Turkey may develop under Joe Biden in the current climate. London-based think tank CEFTUS (Centre for Turkey Studies) is hosting this timely online talk on Zoom on Thursday evening. The event is free and open to the public. However, prior registration is required.

Online Talk Details

Title: Biden's US and Erdoğan's Turkey Date: Thursday 26 November 2020 Time:  6pm to 8pm Talk Registration: use this link to register for the Zoom talk: https://zoom.us/meeting/register After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting Event details: The event is 2 hours long, with the last 30 minutes dedicated as a Q&A session. Important notice: This event is being recorded and shared more widely. By registering for the event, participants accept that the event will be recorded, and distributed on CEFTUS’ social media accounts and website.

About Cengiz Çandar

Veteran journalist Cengiz Çandar at the Halifax International Security Forum, 2012. Photo © CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Cengiz Çandar is an award-winning Turkish journalist, senior columnist, and Middle East expert. He is the author of several books in Turkish and English, including the bestselling ‘Mesopotamian Express – A Journey in History’ (2012), which is published in Turkish, Arabic and Kurdish. His latest book is ‘Turkey’s Mission Impossible: War and Peace with the Kurds’, with a foreword by Eugene Rogan, was published by Lexington Books in June 2020. Çandar is a distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Stockholm University Institute of Turkish Studies and a Senior Associate Fellow at Utrikespolitiska institutet (the Swedish Institute for International Affairs). In 1987, Çandar won the Abdi Ipekçi Peace Prize for contributing to Greek-Turkish relations. He has also served as a Special Advisor to President Turgut Özal on foreign policy (1991-1993), and played a leading role in establishing Turkish-Kurdish relations. The veteran journalist, who has been covering Turkey and its region since 1976, has also been a Public Policy Scholar at the Wilson Center (1999) in Washington DC, a Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace (1999-2000), which is also in Washington, and between 1997-2010 an Adjunct Professor on the Modern History of the Middle East in different universities in Istanbul.

About Dr. Ayşe Zarakol

International relations expert Dr Ayşe Zarakol during 'Identity & Belonging in Post-Brexit Britain' panel discussion in Cambridge, 19 Oct. 2019. Photo © Twitter / Ayşe Karakul

Chairing the CEFTUS session is Ayşe Zarakol, a Reader in International Relations at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Emmanuel College. She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which was selected by Russian newspaper Republic as an essential read in order to understand the 21^st Century. Her most recent book is Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge University Press in 2017). Zarakol is an active member of the PONARS Eurasia international academic network, which advances new policy approaches to research and security in Eurasia. She has held visiting fellowships with the Council of Foreign Relations, the Norwegian Nobel Institute and the University of Copenhagen. She occasionally blogs on Turkish politics for the LRB (London Review of Books) website.