Begüm Burak is an independent political scientist whose research, teaching, and writing focus on democracy, media, human rights, online freedoms, artificial intelligence, Turkish politics, and critical discourse analysis. Burak earned her Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from Fatih University, her M.A. in Public Administration from Istanbul University, and her B.A. in Political Science and International Relations from Marmara University.
Burak served as a Turkey country expert for V-Dem Institute, a Sweden-based democracy research organization. She also served as a researcher for the “Religion and State Project” initiated by Bar Ilan University. She currently serves as an editorial board member for the Scopus-indexed Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching and as a board of advisors member at Learning Life (a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit). She is also an active member of the Democracy Moves Network incubated at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Her publications include the book chapter "Turkish Higher Education in Crisis: An Analysis of Challenges and Future Prospects" in the Palgrave Handbook of Crisis Leadership in Higher Education (2024), the book The Image of the Undesired Citizens in Turkey: A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of the Hürriyet and Zaman Newspapers (2022), based on her Ph.D. dissertation, the e-book Selected Writings on Türkiye (2024), and numerous articles in peer-reviewed academic journals, opinion outlets, and research centers including Alternatives-Turkish Journal of International Relations, E-International Relations, and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
Academia profile: https://independentresearcher.academia.edu/BegumBurak
Blog page: https://begumburak1984.wixsite.com/begumwrites
Poetry blog: https://www.writeoutloud.net/profiles/begumburak
