Lecture
When Turkish Islamism Meets Social Sciences: Essentialism Upgraded?
- Date
- Thursday 23 October 2025
- Time
- Series
- What's New?! Fall Lecture Series 2025
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
This study examines the ways of the Turkish Islamists' decades-old engagement with social sciences. Its main premise is that "the prototype of the Islamist cadre" has increasingly turned into a hobbyist of or career student of social sciences. The Islamists in Turkey have substantially drifted towards a wide range of fields of social sciences since the 1980s, having followed a long period of their fascination with positive sciences for more than a century. Resting on an empirical analysis of a series of Islamist journals and books published in Turkey from the 1980s onwards, the study questions why this knowledge transfer has come to fruition, how the Islamists have operationalized social sciences in their ideology, and what impact his new knowledge has made in the trajectory of Turkish Islamist thought. It shows that this scientific enterprise has been built on a categorical interest in post-colonialism., post-modernism, Marxism, and post-Kemalism from the 1980s to the present.
About the speaker
Dr Tunahan Yıldız is affiliated with the Department of International Relations (IR) at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey. He received his B.S. (2014), M.S. (2016), and Ph.D. (2024) degrees from the Department of IR at METU. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “The International in Turkish Islamist Thought”, was awarded the Best Thesis Prize of METU’s Graduate School of Social Sciences for the 2024–2025 academic year. Since February 2025, he has been based at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies as postdoctoral researcher, funded by the International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program for Turkish Citizens of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). He has also served as an elected board member of the Turkish Political Science Association. His current research interests include non-Western IR, Islamism, nationalism, intellectual history, and Middle Eastern politics. His research has been published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, and Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies. In addition, he translated William Mulligan’s The Origins of the First World War into Turkish.
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