Keynote SpeakerSoli Ozel

Soli Özel holds a BA in Economics from Benningon College (1981) and an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS-1983).

Özel is now a fellow at Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna where he was a “Europe’s Futures” fellow in 2021-2022. During the COVID pandemic, he taught a course at the American University in Central Asia (AUCA) and at the Menton campus of Sciences-Po. During that time he also hosted two series of webinars for Institut Montaigne on the American elections of 2020 and the changing geopolitics of the Middle East. He was a Bernstein Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School and a visiting lecturer in the Political Science Department of Yale. He has been a columnist at Nokta magazine and GazetePazar, Yeni Binyıl, Sabah and Habertürk newspapers. Currently he writes for Institut Montaigne blog, Aposto and does a weekly commentary on world affairs for Medyascope TV. His articles were published in numerous publications around the world.

He held fellowships at Oxford, the EU Institute of Strategic Studies. He held a Keyman fellowship at Northwestern University and was a Fisher Family Fellow of the “Future of Diplomacy Program” at the Belfer Center of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He taught at UC Santa Cruz, SAIS, University of Washington, Northwestern University, Hebrew University, SciencesPo-PSIA, AUCA and Yale. In Turkey he taught at Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, Bilgi Üniversitesi and Kadir Has Universitesi. He was a Richard von Weizsacker fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin between 2015-2017 and a visiting fellow at Institut Montaigne in Paris in 2018 where he is a non -resident senior fellow.

His co-authored book with Michael T. Rock, Elite Origins of Development and Democracy was published by Routledge in December 2023.

He is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.