Dr Katerina Dalacoura

Dr Katerina Dalacoura is Associate Professor in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Director of the LSE Middle East Centre.

She held a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust between 2021 and 2024. The project findings will shortly be published as a book monograph by Cambridge University Press, under the title Islamic International Thought in Turkey: History, Civilisation and Nation.

In 2015-16, she was British Academy Mid-Career Fellow and in 2016-19 she participated in a project on the ‘Middle East and North Africa Regional Architecture’, sponsored by the European Commission under the auspices of Horizon 2020 (2016-19). She previously worked at the University of Essex and at the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Dr Dalacoura’s work has centered on the intersection of Islamism and international human rights norms. She has worked on human rights, democracy and democracy promotion, in the Middle East, particularly in the context of Western policies in the region.

Her latest research focuses on the role of culture and civilization in International Relations with special reference to Turkey. She has a continuing interest in questions of secularity and secularization in the Middle East. She is author of Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights: Implications for International Relations (I. B. Tauris, 2007), Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and of a number of chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Dr Dalacoura currently teaches a first year undergraduate course in International Relations theory and supervises undergraduate and post-graduate dissertations.

Katerina Dalacoura supervises doctoral studies in areas including:
the Middle East and international relations theory; culture and civilization in IR; religion and secularity in IR; Islamist movements and international human rights and democracy norms; Turkish Islamist history pertaining to IR; Turkish foreign policy.
However she will consider other proposals too.

AWARDS:

• Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for three years (2021-2024). Her project, entitled ‘The International Thought of Turkish Islamists: History, Civilization and Nation’, was situated within the discipline of International Relations and specifically engages with the concept of a ‘global IR’.
• British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, ‘Alternative Universalisms? Contemporary Turkish Discourses on Culture in International Relations’ 1 September 2015 – 31 August 2016
• Partner/Participant (LSE), Horizon 20-20, Middle East and North Africa Regional Architecture: Mapping Geopolitical Shifts, Regional Order and Domestic Transformations (MENARA), Submission led by: Centre for International Information and Documentation in Barcelona (CIDOB), 1 April 2016 – 31 January 2019.
• United States Institute of Peace, grant for ‘Democracy and Terrorism in the Middle East’ project, fieldwork and salary replacement, 2007.
• Research Officer for a Leverhulme Trust grant in 1996-7.

Expertise

Islamist thought; Turkey; the Middle East and IR theory; the international politics of culture and religion; global IR