Director, Turkish Research Program, The Washington Institute
Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. He has written extensively on United States-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics and Turkish nationalism, published in scholarly journals and major international print media.
Cagaptay is a regular columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey’s oldest and most influential English-language paper. He appears regularly on Fox News, CNN, NPR, Voice of America, BBC and CNN-Turk.
A historian by training, Soner Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University on Turkish nationalism. He has taught courses on Middle East, Mediterranean and Eastern Europe at Yale, Princeton University, Georgetown University and Smith College.
His spring 2003 course on modern Turkish history was the first offered by Yale in three decades. From 2006-2007, he was Ertegun Professor at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies.
This year’s Istanbul election and last year’s move to a presidential system have unified and galvanized the opposition, raising questions about Erdogan’s next move.
Erdogan can use any number of legal, political or foreign policy tools to ensure his candidate wins this time around, no matter the reputational costs.
Erdogan is driving out business people and the well-educated – the economic forces he needs to achieve his goal of transforming the country into a great power.
