Alp Yenen is a University Lecturer at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He works primarily on the political history of modern Turkey and the Middle East. He is specialized on the turn of the 20th century, First World War, Interwar period, and the Cold War period. He also comments and consults on contemporary politics in Turkey.

More information about Alp Yenen

Turkish Studies

I am part of the Turkish Studies track in the Middle Eastern Studies program at Leiden University, where I cover themes of political history, political culture, and international relations of modern Turkey since late Ottoman Empire. I am also a founding member of the Turkey Studies Network in the Low Countries, an independent academic platform for researchers in the Benelux interested in the study of Turkey. For the occasion of the centennial of the Republic of Turkey in 2023, I have co-edited with Erik-Jan Zürcher A Hundred Years of Republican Turkey: A History in a Hundred Fragments (Leiden University Press, 2023: Turkish translation: İletişim, 2024), a volume that offers 100 historical sources introduced by over 70 scholars of Turkish Studies.  

Fields of interest

My research interests lie in the history of Turkey and the Middle East in international affairs of the twentieth century. In research and teaching, I am interested in transnational relations, transitional periods, and transgressive politics.

Research themes:

• International and transnational history
• Empires and nationalism
• Diplomatic history and history of international relations
• Revolution, war, and genocide
• Contentious politics and social movements
• Conspiracy theories and parapolitics
• Heroization, masculinity, and martyrdom
• Orientalism and history of Oriental Studies
• History of the First World War and the Interwar period
• History of the Cold War in the Third World

Teaching

I supervise MA theses on the political history of the late Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey, and modern Middle East, preferably on the above listed themes.

Courses regularly taught:

• BA seminar: Ideology and Politics in the Middle East
• BA seminar: History and Culture of Modern Turkey
• MA seminar: Political History of the Middle East in the 20th Century
• BA International Studies: Thesis and Thesis Seminar Middle East A, sem 2: Contentious Politics in the Middle East

Research

I have been affiliated with international research collaborations, such as DFG’s network on the Contemporary History of Turkey, DFG’s Collaborative Research Center Heroes – Heroizations – Heroisms, and the European COST Action Comparative Analysis of Conspiracy Theories in Europe. Currently, I am affiliated with the ERC project Women Migrants from the Northern Mediterranean and Work in Postwar Northwestern Europe at the University of Maastricht.

The End of the First World War and the Making of the Modern Middle East

I am specialized on the so-called “Young Turk era”, a transitional period from the late Ottoman Empire to post-Ottoman world, ca. 1889–1927, a timeframe centered around the formation of the modern Middle East at the end of the First World War. In particular, I have published several journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries on various themes such as Turkish-Arab relations, pan-Islamism, anticolonialism and Bolshevism, postwar insurgencies, conspiracy theories and intelligence services, Turkish-Armenian relations, and revolutionary diplomacy during the end of the Ottoman Empire and their legacies. My first book The Young Turk International: How Islamic Bolshevism Shaped the Global Order at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2026)  offers a global history of Young Turk networks and Muslim anticolonial movements during the aftermath of the First World War.

In more general terms, I also teach and do research on broader revolutionary processes during the making of the modern Middle East from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. I authored an article about a frontier theory of revolution and empire in the Middle East and an encyclopedia entry on the heroization of social bandits in world history. Together with Dr. Ramazan H. Öztan, I’ve have co-edited a volume, titled Age of Rogues: Rebels, Revolutionaries, and Racketeers at the Frontiers of Empires (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), which offers case studies on transgressive actors from the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Caucasus.

The End of the Cold War and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East

In the last years, my teaching and research have focused on Turkey and the Middle East during the Cold War. As my second book project, I am examining how global, regional, and local dynamics of the “long 1970s” (1967–1982) shaped post-Cold War political orders in Turkey and the broader Middle East. My work combines draws on approaches from history of contentious politics, historical international relations, and global historical sociology.  I have published on the role of martyrdom in the political mobilization of radical-left and far-right groups in Cold War Turkey, as well as on how Middle East experts have interpreted the crisis in Turkey that culminated in the military intervention of September 1980, especially in light of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. More recently, I have co-authored a programmatic article on the state of research on Cold War Turkey, a long neglected topic that is now emerging as one of the most dynamic and vibrant areas in Turkish Studies.

Publications