KHAS International Relations Departmental Seminars: Dr. Fulya Hisarlıoğlu

The Departmental Seminars organized by Kadir Has University International Relations Department and Jean Monnet Chair host Dr. Fulya Hisarlıoğlu on Friday, June 2 at 1 PM.

You can follow Dr. Hisarlıoğlu’s speech, titled “We Are ‘The People’: A Comparative Study on Populist Foreign Policy Making in Turkey and Hungary” on Zoom.

Zoom ID: 829 1662 7875

Passcode: 572156

Abstract: This talk is based on one of my recently published projects in collaboration with distinguished scholars including Lerna Yanık, Umut Korkut and İlke Civelekoğlu. It basically addresses the link between populism and foreign policy making by examining the rhetoric of two populist leaders-Turkey’s Erdoğan and Hungary’s Orban. We argue that when populists bring populism into foreign policy, they do so by contesting the “corrupt elites” of the international order and, simultaneously, attempt to create the “pure people” transnationally. With its comparative approach, we aim at understanding transnational populism as a way of political communication with both domestic and international audience. Vertical stratification mechanisms that stem from the antagonistic binaries inherent to populism provide populist leaders with the necessary superiority and inferiority labels allowing them to discursively renegotiate hierarchies in the international system to modify the existing ones or to create new ones.

About the Speaker: Hisarlıoğlu completed her undergraduate education in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University. She obtained an integrated doctoral degree in Political Science and Public Administration from Bilkent University in 2015. In her doctoral thesis, she focused on understanding the elements of change and continuity in Cyprus policy within the context of Turkey’s European Union membership process. She has conducted research on identity, culture, and normative changes in Turkish foreign policy, particularly in the field of permeability between foreign policy and domestic policy. Hisarlıoğlu has published several articles in SSCI journals such as International Relations, International Studies Review, and Geopolitics, and has contributed to book projects published by distinguished national and international publishers. She edited the book “Critical Readings of Turkish Foreign Policy” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2022 with Birsen Erdoğan. Hisarlıoğlu, working as a post-doctoral fellow, continues her academic studies at Kadir Has University since 2021.