Ayşe Zarakol: Background
I am a Reader in International Relations at the University of Cambridge, where I also have an appointment as a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College.
I grew up in Istanbul, Turkey and moved to the US to attend Middlebury College, Vermont (BA in Political Science and Classical Studies). My graduate degrees are from University of Wisconsin - Madison (MA and PhD in Political Science) where I was supervised by Michael Barnett (primary) and David Leheny. After graduation I worked as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Politics at Washington & Lee University, Virginia, until I was appointed to my current position at Cambridge University.
My research is at the intersection of historical sociology and IR, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, problems of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in a comparative perspective. I am the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which deals with international stigmatisation and the integration of defeated non-Western powers (Turkey after WWI, Japan after WWII and Russia after the Cold War) into the international system. This book was also published in Turkish as Yenilgiden Sonra: Doğu Batı ile Yaşamayı Nasıl Öğrendi from Koç University Press (2012), with a new introduction I wrote for Turkish readers. For the last few years I have been overseeing an international collaboration aimed at theorising Hierarchies in World Politics (forthcoming in the Cambridge Studies in International Relations series of the Cambridge University Press in 2017).
My articles have appeared in journals such as International Organization, International Theory, International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Relations, Journal of Democracy and Cooperation and Conflict (for a full list see here). I also regularly author policy memos, edited book chapters and book reviews. I am an active member of the PONARS Eurasia international academic network which advances new policy approaches to research and security in Russia and Eurasia. During the 2012-3 Academic Year, I was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. I completed my fellowship at the Congressional Research Service (US Library of Congress) in Washington, DC, within the Foreign Affairs, Trade and Defense Section, where I conducted research on rising powers. In 2016, I held visiting fellowships at CRASSH (University of Cambridge) and the Norwegian Nobel Institute. The contributions of my research have been recognised by a number of funding institutions and professional associations, most recently earning me the designation of 'rising star' from the IR section of Swedish Political Science Association (SWEPSA). I also serve on several international advisory boards. Currently, I am an Associate Editor at the Journal of Global Security Studies (an ISA publication), a Series Editor for the Palgrave Studies in International Relations, and the program chair for the Historical International Relations Section of the ISA.
At the moment, I am working on several major projects: 1) a second solo book, tentatively entitled 'Waiting for the Barbarians: Great Powers and the politics of decline'; 2) a co-authored manuscript with Dr Jelena Subotic about nation-branding in international politics; 3) a five-year research project led by Professor Rebecca Adler-Nissen on diplomacy and social-media, which recently acquired substantial European Research Council funding. I also have smaller projects in progress dealing with issues such as conceptualisation of sovereignty in non-Western contexts, recognition in international relations, and sociology of IR as a discipline.
Last updated May 2017
