Ezgi Başaran is a scholar of the politics of the Middle East and Turkey, based in Oxford.
Her work bridges journalism and academia, with a focus on authoritarianism, political Islam, and the Kurdish question. She has developed a distinctive voice through years of frontline reporting and sustained academic research.
She began her career as a journalist in Istanbul, joining Hürriyet in 2004. In a media landscape dominated by men and shaped by state influence, she rose quickly through the ranks to become the youngest and first female editor of Radikal, Turkey’s leading center-left newspaper. Her columns and investigative reporting during this time focused on civil-military relations, the peace process with the PKK, and the transformation of Turkish Islamism under the AKP.
As the political climate in Turkey deteriorated after the 2013 Gezi protests and the collapse of the Kurdish peace talks, the crackdown on the media intensified. She stepped down as editor-in-chief in January 2016 and initially moved to Oxford for several months. However, as the authoritarian slide deepened, she decided to take a break from journalism and shifted toward academia. Leaving her treasured city of Istanbul—where she was shaped not only as a journalist but also as a woman—was difficult. But soon, Oxford’s “dust,” as portrayed in Philip Pullman’s famous trilogy, took hold of her, and the city became her new home.
At the University of Oxford, she completed an MPhil and then a DPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies. Her doctoral work traced the ideological and strategic entanglements between Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Tunisia’s Ennahda, and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of the Arab Uprisings. She conducted fieldwork in Istanbul, Ankara, and Tunis, combining elite interviews with archival and media research.
Between 2017 and 2020, she served as the coordinator of the Programme on Contemporary Turkey at SEESOX, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. The programme brought together diplomats, scholars, and journalists to critically engage with the transformations in Turkish politics and foreign policy. In the 2023–2024 academic year, she taught the graduate course Politics of the Middle East and North Africa at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford.
Her writing has appeared in The Economist, Financial Times, BBC, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, and she is regularly invited to speak on panels about the Middle East, political Islam, and authoritarianism. She is the author of Barış Bir Varmış, Bir Yokmuş (2015), a detailed chronicle of Turkey’s failed Kurdish peace process; Frontline Turkey (2017), which examines the political dynamics behind the collapse of the Kurdish peace process between 2013 and 2015; and The New Spirit of Islamism (2024), which explores how Islamist movements in Turkey, Tunisia, and Egypt adapted their strategies in dialogue with one another after the Arab Spring.
She writes the weekly Substack newsletter Angle, Anchor and Voice, which explores current developments in the Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey through a mix of historical insight, field observation, and political critique.