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Dr Ilke Toygür

Visiting Senior Fellow
European Institute

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About

About

Ilke Toygür is the Director of the Global Policy Center and Professor of European Politics at the School of Politics, Economics, and Global Affairs at IE University, Madrid, Spain.

In addition, she is a senior associate at the CSIS Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program in Washington DC and serves as an elected board member of the Trans European Policy Studies Association (TEPSA) in Brussels. She joined the ECFR Council in April 2025 and the College of Europe in Bruges as a Visiting Professor in September 2025.

Dr. Toygür is an economist and political scientist who began her career back in 2008, working at the Economic Development Foundation (IKV), a research institute focusing on the European Union. She completed her PhD degree in Political Science at the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2016. Her doctoral research focused on the impact of European integration on the vote and party system change in European Parliament elections in times of crises. Her academic research on the European Parliament elections continues as a board member of European Election Studies and it was recently published by the Journal of Public Policy.

Following the completion of her PhD, she worked for the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid and for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Brussels. She has also been a lecturer at the University Carlos III of Madrid. She has been awarded research grants at the European University Institute (2013), University of Mannheim (2014), Sabanci University’s Istanbul Policy Center (2015) and Brookings Institution (2018). In 2024, she has been selected as a Mercator Foundation Fellow in Germany.

Her main areas of expertise include European integration, elections and democracy in Western Europe, the geopolitics of Europe and the EU in the World, with a special focus on transatlantic relations and relations with middle powers. Her research and articles have so far appeared in Carnegie Europe, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Brookings Institution, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Der Spiegel, and El País, among others. Dr. Toygür frequently does foreign policy briefings and exchanges with EU institutions and member states’ governments.

Expertise

  • European Politics
  • European integration and wider Europe
  • Political parties, party systems, elections and voting behaviour in Western Europe
  • Global trends of democracy and authoritarianism
  • Geopolitics of Europe
  • Transatlantic relations
  • Europe’s Relations with the Global South
  • Turkish foreign policy, Turkey’s relations with the West
  • Research for Policy