Soner Çağaptay

Soner Cagaptay (; born in 1970) is a Turkish-American political scientist based in the United States. He is director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He specializes in Turkey–United States relations, Turkish politics, and Turkish nationalism.

Education Cagaptay received his Ph.D. degree in history from Yale University in 2003. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Turkish nationalism.

He has also served on contract as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies Program at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute.

In the media Cagaptay has written on Turkey–United States relations; Turkish domestic politics; Turkish nationalism; Turkey's rise as an economic power and Ankara's Middle East policy, publishing in venues including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Times, International Herald Tribune, Jane's Defence Weekly, and Habertürk. He is a regular columnist for Hürriyet Daily News, Turkey's oldest English-language paper, and a contributor to CNN's Global Public Square blog. His book Erdogan's Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East was published in September 2019 by I.B. Tauris. On February 16, 2022, he testified at a Helsinki Commission briefing entitled "Conflict of Interest? Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Turkey."

Books A Sultan in Autumn: Erdogan Faces Turkey's Uncontainable Forces (2021). London: I.B. Tauris. . Erdogan's Empire: Turkey and the Politics of the Middle East (2019). London: I.B. Tauris. . OCLC 1121097111 The New Sultan: Erdogan and the Crisis of Modern Turkey (2017). London I.B. Tauris. . OCLC 974880239. The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century's First Muslim Power (2014). Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books. . OCLC 869736354 Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who is a Turk? (2006). Milton Park, UK: Taylor & Francis. . OCLC 1027167702

Academic papers

Cagaptay, Soner (2013). "Defining Turkish Power: Turkey as a Rising Power Embedded in the Western International System". Turkish Studies. 14 (4): 797–811. doi:10.1080/14683849.2013.861110. ISSN 1468-3849 Cagaptay, Soner (2007). "Race, Assimilation and Kemalism: Turkish Nationalism and the Minorities in the 1930s". Middle Eastern Studies. 40 (3): 86–101. doi:10.1080/0026320042000213474. ISSN 0026-3206 Çağaptay, Soner (2007). "Reconfiguring the Turkish nation in the 1930s". Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. 8 (2): 67–82. doi:10.1080/13537110208428662. ISSN 1353-7113 Çağaptay, Soner (2003). "Citizenship policies in interwar Turkey*". Nations and Nationalism. 9 (4): 601–619. doi:10.1111/1469-8219.00129. ISSN 1469-8129