Ahmet Sözen
Eastern Mediterranean University Famagusta, Cyprus
Ahmet Sözen is professor of Political Science and International Relations, at Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU). Sözen is also the founding Director of Cyprus Policy Center – a think tank within EMU. Sözen received his BA degree in 1991 from Boğaziçi University, his MA in 1993 from Syracuse University and his PhD in 1999 from University of Missouri-Columbia. During his PhD dissertation fieldwork – which was on the Cyprus inter-communal peace negotiations, Sözen was granted one of the fifty 1997 Paul Harris Ambassadorial Peace Scholarships on International Conflict Resolution given on a world-wide competition by International Rotary Foundation. Besides his university work Prof. Sözen is the founding Turkish Cypriot Co-Director of the UNDP funded program Cyprus 2015 which operated first under Interpeace and later became the first inter-communal think-tank called SeeD – Center for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development. He has also been a member of the Greek – Turkish Forum which is co-sponsored by the Foreign Ministries of Greece and Turkey. Since 2014, together with Hubert Faustman he has been writing the annual reports about Cyprus for the Political Data Yearbook of the European Journal of Political Research. Sözen has been very active on the policy and advocacy fronts. His experience over the last twenty years as a peace-activist includes peace-building and democratization processes, including participating into peace-negotiations from the first-track in Cyprus where Sözen was a member of the official Turkish Cypriot negotiation team in the UN-led peace negotiations; active involvement in second-track peace and democratization initiatives; providing training and education in the areas of conflict resolution, mediation and peace-building; designing policy recommendations based on objective participatory research with the societal stakeholders and polling. Sözen has published extensively on the Cyprus conflict and Turkish foreign policy. He has given dozens of invited speeches on conflict resolution – including two TED talks (TEDxNicosia 2012, TEDxEMUniversity 2014) and the Cyprus conflict in various countries and he frequently appears on both local and Turkish media, as well as international media, such as Al-Jazeera and BBC, where he comments on world events.