TÜBA Member Prof. Dr. Aktürk Receives Outstanding Article Award from APSA
TÜBA Associate Member and faculty member in the Department of International Relations at Koç University, Prof. Dr. Şener Aktürk, has been awarded the Outstanding Article Award by the International History and Politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for his article titled “Not So Innocent: Clerics, Monarchs, and the Ethnoreligious Cleansing of Western Europe.”
Prof. Dr. Aktürk stated, “It is a great honor for me to be the first recipient of this award as an academic affiliated with an institution in Türkiye.” He also noted that the journal in which the article was published, International Security, ranked first among 169 journals in the field of international relations according to the 2024 Journal Citation Reports (JCR), announced in 2025. He shared that the award ceremony will take place in September in Vancouver, Canada, during APSA’s annual conference.
The APSA Outstanding Article Award has been presented annually since 2017 by the association’s International History and Politics section to the best article published in the previous year. In the past nine years, a total of nine articles—mostly co-authored—have received the award, along with two honorable mentions.
Who is Prof. Dr. Şener Aktürk?
Prof. Dr. Şener Aktürk was born in İzmit in 1981. He completed his secondary and high school education at Koç Private High School. He received his undergraduate degree with a double major in Political Science and International Studies from the University of Chicago between 1999 and 2003. During his undergraduate studies, in 2001, he attended a program in Vienna focusing on German language and Western civilization. He earned his first M.A. degree in International Relations, also from the University of Chicago. He later completed a second M.A. degree and a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, between 2003 and 2009, conducting field research in Berlin and Moscow as part of his doctoral work. In the 2009–2010 academic year, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, where he also taught graduate-level courses in the Department of Government.
Upon returning to Türkiye in the second half of 2010, Prof. Dr. Aktürk joined the Department of International Relations at Koç University, where he served as Assistant Professor (2009–2015), Associate Professor (2015–2022), and was promoted to Professor thereafter.
As of 2023, Prof. Dr. Aktürk has published a total of 15 articles in SSCI-indexed journals, 12 of which are single-authored. As of November 30, 2023, his Google Scholar metrics include an h-index of 22 and an i10-index of 40. His book Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, received the Joseph Rothschild Book Prize in 2013.
Prof. Dr. Aktürk was the first scholar affiliated with a Turkish institution to publish in World Politics in 2011, the leading journal in international relations by impact factor, and in Post-Soviet Affairs in 2010, one of the top-ranked journals in area studies. He has also published a single-authored article in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the highest impact journal in ethnic studies (2017), and a co-authored article in Perspectives on Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association (2021). His other articles have appeared in SSCI-indexed journals such as Comparative Politics, Mediterranean Politics, Social Science Quarterly, European Journal of Sociology, Nationalities Papers, Problems of Post-Communism, Turkish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Osteuropa, and Uluslararası İlişkiler.
Beyond SSCI-indexed journals, Prof. Dr. Aktürk has published 34 articles in academic journals including Theoria, Ab Imperio, All Azimuth, Insight Turkey, Turkish Policy Quarterly, Central Eurasian Studies Review, Perceptions, and Doğu Batı. He has also authored chapters in 20 edited volumes published in English, Russian, and Turkish, and written 24 book reviews. His collection of Turkish-language articles, Türkiye’nin Kimlikleri (The Identities of Türkiye), was published in 2013.
Prof. Dr. Aktürk has received numerous awards, including the TÜBİTAK Incentive Award (2019), Koç University Research Award (2019–2020), Science Academy’s BAGEP Award (2017), Koç University Outstanding Educator Award (2017), TÜBA GEBİP Award (2016), Kadir Has Promising Scientist Award (2015), Joseph Rothschild Prize (2013), Baki Komsuoğlu Encouragement Award (2011), Third Prize in the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Awards (2010), the University of California Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award (2009), and the Peter Odegard Award from UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science (2006).
Between 2010 and 2014, his research project collecting data on the ethnic and religious policies of states in 173 countries received funding from the European Commission’s Marie Curie Reintegration Grant (EUR 100,000). In December 2023, he was elected as an Associate Member of TÜBA.