Soner Cagaptay

Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. He has written extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics, and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals and major international print media, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Atlantic. He appears regularly on CNN, NPR, BBC, and CNN-Turk. A historian by training, Dr. Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University (2003) on Turkish nationalism. Dr. Cagaptay has taught courses at Yale, Princeton University, Georgetown University, and Smith College on the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. He has also served on contract as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies Program at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. He has also testified before the Helsinki Commission on human rights and foreign policy issues in Turkey.

"Erdogan's Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East" (2019), which details Turkey's foreign policy under Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Ankara's evolving ties with the U.S., Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in the context of Turkish and Ottoman history, is the final book in the Cagaptay trilogy. The previous two editions of the trilogy are: "The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century's First Muslim Power" (2014), which describes the economic growth that Erdogan delivered in the last decade, and "The New Sultan" (2017), which sheds light on Turkey's domestic political crisis under Erdogan.

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Erdogan's Empire named "best book on Turkey" by CNN's Fareed Zakaria

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"Just finished reading Soner Cagaptay’s latest book, Erdogan’s Empire, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in U.S.-Turkey relations and Turkey’s foreign policy under Erdoğan’s leadership. Soner’s book is an excellent, digestible read that intermixes history and smart political analysis of events in Ankara over the past 17 years. He provides a balanced and mostly objective take on Erdoğan’s worldview, foreign policy mishaps and successes, and challenges a Western English-speaking audience’s notions of Turkey’s relations with its neighbors and the broader world. Love him or hate him, Erdoğan is the most significant Turkish leader since Atatürk and Turkey remains a pivotal country for the U.S. and the West. Soner’s book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in understanding this complex and fascinating figure." - Andy Taylor