Metin Yücekaya

Metin Yücekaya is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the International Security Program. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the Social Sciences University of Ankara. His scholarship centers on the politics of middle and great powers, the dynamics of alliance formation, grand strategy, and European security.

His doctoral dissertation examined middle power alignments, advancing the regional system as the appropriate level of analysis for understanding the interests that underlie such alignments, drawing on the late nineteenth-century cases of the Ottoman-German, Anglo-Japanese, and Italian-Triple Alliance relationships. During his doctoral studies, he was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He is presently engaged in two lines of inquiry. The first interrogates the grand strategic adaptation of middle powers, tracing the mechanisms through which such states recalibrate their strategic postures amid shifting systemic pressures. The second examines the interventions of hegemonic powers within regional security systems, and the manner in which such interventions reconfigure the strategic calculus of the states embedded within them.

Yücekaya has also appeared as a commentator on foreign policy matters in the national media.

He holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in International Relations from Middle East Technical University, and a B.A. in International Relations from TOBB University of Economics and Technology.