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Professor Umut Özkirimli

Visiting Professor
Department of International Relations

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About

About

Umut Özkirimli is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), Senior Research Associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Centre for International Affairs), and, in 2026–27, Visiting Professor in the Department of International Relations at LSE. He has spent more than three decades studying nationalism, national identity, democracy and democratisation, social movements and academic freedom.

He took his BA at Boğaziçi University and an MSc at the London School of Economics before completing a PhD in International Relations at Istanbul University in 1999. He taught for over a decade at Istanbul Bilgi University, where he became Professor of International Relations, and later held long-standing positions at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University and at Blanquerna (Universitat Ramon Llull). Based in Barcelona since 2019, at IBEI and CIDOB, he has also held visiting appointments at LSE, EUI Florence, the University of Copenhagen and the University of Sussex.

Theories of Nationalism, first published in 2000 and now in its third edition, has been translated into Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Greek; a fourth edition is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic. His other work spans the theory of nationalism, the politics of Greece and Turkey, the Kurdish question, and — more recently — academic freedom, identity politics and the culture wars, the subject of his 2023 book Cancelled: The Left Way Back from Woke (Polity). He is also writing Nationalism Today for Hurst & Co.

Alongside his scholarship he writes for a general audience in The Guardian, Project Syndicate, El País, openDemocracy, Times Higher Education and The Critic, comments regularly in the Spanish and international media, and publishes the newsletter Partisan on Substack.

Research Cluster affiliation

Theory/Area/History research cluster

Not available to supervise PhD students

Expertise

Theories of nationalism; national identity and the politics of belonging; identity politics and the culture wars; academic freedom; democracy, populism and the far right; nationalism in Turkey and the Middle East, including the Kurdish question; Greece, Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean; migration, multiculturalism and belonging.