Seda Gürkan is Assistant Professor in European Approaches to Security, Diplomacy and Global Affairs at Leiden University’s Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA). She is also an Affiliated Fellow and Professor at the Department of Political Science and the Institute for European Studies (IEE), at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

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Seda Gürkan is Assistant Professor in European Approaches to Security, Diplomacy and Global Affairs at Leiden University’s Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA). She is also an Affiliated Fellow and Professor at the Department of Political Science and the Institute for European Studies (IEE), at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB).

Seda is a graduate of the London School of Economics (LSE), Université libre de Bruxelles and Diplomatic School of Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was previously a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington DC and a visiting fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU). Prior to joining academia, she practised international diplomacy for ten years as an international civil servant at NATO Headquarters in Brussels at the cabinet of Assistant Secretary General. At NATO, she was in charge of NATO-EU relations, counter-terrorism, missile defence and defence aspects of NATO’s operations. Seda regularly provides expert opinions to the European Parliament on the EU’s enlargement, human rights and the EU’s neighbourhood. She is the country expert (Turkey) for Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) since 2018.

She is a member of the Steering committee of Leiden University's interdisciplinary Europe Hub and co-lead of Una Europa Doctoral Interdisciplinary Methods Training (DIMT) programme.

Teaching and research interests

Her teaching and research interests include EU foreign policy (with a focus on the autocratization processes in the EU’s Eastern neighbourhood, enlargement, EU-Turkey relations), European security and diplomacy, the crises the EU has been facing since 2009, EU institutions, European integration theories, parliamentary diplomacy (European Parliament), emotions in international relations, and methodology in political science.

Her latest publications include a co-authored volume ‘Theorising the Crises of the European Union’ published by Routledge in 2021 and a co-edited Special Issue on the ‘Emotions in EUropean Foreign Policy’ by Global Affairs in 2021.

She currently leads a Starter Grant on the role of emotions in EU foreign policy (EUMOTION), and she is currently involved in two Horizon Europe projects (2022-2025), both dealing with the impact of the processes of autocratisation in the EU’s neighbouring countries on the EU’s foreign policy instruments:

• Horizon-MSCA ‘Globalisation, Europe and Multilateralism: Democratic institutions, the rise of alternative models and mounting normative dissensus’ (GEM-DIAMOND);
• Horizon RIA project ‘Respond to Emerging Dissensus: Supranational Instruments and Norms of European democracy’ (RED-SPINEL).

Activities