Bilge Yabanci is a Faculty member at the University of Deusto's Faculty of Social and Human Sciences in Bilbao, Spain, where she also holds the positions of Ikerbasque Research Fellow and Ramón y Cajal Fellow. She is the author of Civil Society and Autocratisation: Co-optation, Repression, and Contestation in Turkey (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Her research has been featured in academic journals, including Government and Opposition, Democratization, Journal of Civil Society, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Politics, Religion & Ideology, and Ethnopolitics, among others. Karabekir Akkoyunlu is Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Science, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). His research focuses on democratisation, autocratisation and militarisation in the Global South, with a particular interest in Turkey, Iran and Brazil. His recent publications include Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey: Tutelary Consolidation, Popular Contestation (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and 'Blood Gambit: how autocratizing populists fuel ethnic conflict to reverse election setbacks - evidence from Turkey and Israel' (Democratization, 2024, with Yusuf Sarfati). Kerem Öktem is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and a Senior Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Istanbul. His research focuses on the politics and international relations of Turkey, with particular emphasis on diaspora, minority, and citizenship policies. He co-edited the volume Turkish Jews and their Diasporas: Entanglements and Separations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) with Ipek Yosmaölu (Northwestern University). Currently, he is working on two interconnected research projects: one explores the role of cultural policies in reshaping Turkish citizenship discourses, while the other examines the exercise of these discourses in the context of neo-imperial power projections in the Balkans. Kerem Öktem also serves as Chair of the Consortium for European Studies on Turkey (CEST) and sits on the editorial boards of several leading journals in the field of Turkish Studies.
