Position:
Associate Member of Faculty
Faculty / College Address:
Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Email:
ezgi@angleanchorvoice.co.uk
Courses Taught:
Politics of the Middle East (MPhil / MSc)
Profile:
Dr Ezgi Başaran is a political scientist and former journalist from Istanbul, based in Oxford. She began her career reporting from conflict zones and major international events, later becoming the youngest editor-in-chief of a leading liberal newspaper in Turkey. Her work has examined the Kurdish conflict, Turkish and Middle Eastern politics, the dynamics of authoritarianism, and the struggles over freedom of expression.
Her first book in English, Frontline Turkey: The Crisis at the Heart of the Middle East (2017), examined Turkey’s Kurdish question and its regional implications. Her most recent book, The New Spirit of Islamism (2024), explores the political confluence between Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey’s AKP, and Tunisia’s Ennahda in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings. Her writing and commentary have also appeared widely in international media.
At Oxford, she taught the graduate course Politics of the Middle East in 2023–24 and will continue teaching it in 2025–26. She holds an MPhil and DPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony’s College, Oxford. Drawing on more than two decades in journalism alongside her academic research, she works on the intersections of politics, power, and society in Turkey and the wider Middle East.
Her current research investigates the shifting zones of interaction between political actors across communal and national boundaries, with a particular focus on Turkey and Syria as settings where authority and belonging remain unsettled and are constantly renegotiated among Kurds, Turks, and Arabs.
She is also the author of the weekly newsletter Angle, Anchor, and Voice, which provides analysis and reflection on contemporary politics in Turkey and the wider MENA region.
