Prof. Dr. Ahmet Kasım Han

In addition to his academic work, Prof. Dr. Ahmet K. Han’s career encompasses the intersection of strategic advisory roles, executive leadership in the private sector, and global thought leadership. As well as serving as the Vice President of the Board of Trustees at TED University in Ankara, affiliated with the Turkish Education Association —the first non-governmental organization in the Republic of Turkey dedicated to education— he is the Vice Rector at Beykoz University in Istanbul where he is also a member of faculty in the Department of International Relations in English at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Beyond his academic endeavors, Prof. Han aspires to contribute to ongoing discussions in the areas of economics, foreign policy, and energy geopolitics in Turkey and the Middle East and North Africa region, through interviews and opinion pieces published and broadcast in various international and international media outlets. He is frequently consulted by prestigious publications such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Paris Match, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, BBC, VoA, NBC, Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, and The Economist. In this context, in the span of three and a half decades of his career he has appeared in close to 1,000 interviews in domestic and international media.

Prof. Han has held high-level academic and administrative roles as Vice Rector, Dean, and advisor to the Rector and the Board of Trustees at Aydın, Altınbaş, and Kadir Has Universities, as well as serving as Department Chair. Previously, he directed the Research Center for Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University and served as a faculty member in the Faculty of Economics at Istanbul University. Prior to that he was also a faculty member in the MBA programs at Istanbul Bilgi University. Actively involved in civil society organizations, Prof. Han is Vice President and Chair of the Academic Research at the Turkish Democracy Foundation and a board member at the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM), one of Turkey’s leading independent think tanks. Additionally, Prof. Dr. Ahmet Kasım Han is the academic coordinator of the Political Leadership Excellence Program, a joint initiative of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and EDAM, providing strategic guidance and training to aspiring young leaders.

In the field of defense and strategic studies, Prof. Han served as an Adjunct Professor of Strategy at the Atatürk Institute for Strategic Studies of the Turkish National Defense University until 2020 and was an academic advisor at the Armed Forces Joint Operations Higher Command and Control Academy of the Staff College. He currently works as a Senior Research Fellow on the Middle East and North Africa at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) in Milan. He has contributed to the “On Turkey” series by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and participated in high-level diplomatic initiatives addressing various international crises and issues related to energy resources, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Asia-Pacific regions. Furthermore, he has served and continues to serve on the advisory, review, and academic boards of several academic journals, like International Relations, the first Turkish journal indexed in the SSCI, published by the International Relations Council of Turkey, and Defence Against Terrorism Review published by the NATO Centre of Excellence for Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) amongst others.

Prof. Han completed his undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and post-doctoral studies in economics, international relations, strategy, finance, and negotiation strategies at Istanbul, Boğaziçi, Koç, and Harvard Universities. He has also been a visiting lecturer at the Center for Syrian Studies at the University of St. Andrews and at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. In 2003, he was recognized as one of the "Fifteen Young Leaders of Europe" by the U.S. Department of State and was awarded a scholarship for their prestigious foreign policy studies program. In 2015, he was awarded another scholarship by Tel Aviv University for studies on Israel and the Middle East. In 2024, he participated in the Strategic Planning for Political Parties program under the Friedrich Naumann Foundation’s International Academy for Leadership.

Since the beginning of his career, Prof. Dr. Han has maintained a close collaboration with the private sector, blending academic research with practice. In this capacity, he frequently speaks at global conferences on international order and systemic change, great power rivalries, strategic studies and thought, Middle Eastern and Turkish politics, energy geopolitics, political economy, and political and economic risk management. Moreover, he has provided consultancy to various national and international commercial and industrial organizations in more than 10 sectors and has delivered speeches and lectures on global and regional political and economic dynamics in over 50 countries. Prof. Han is also a professional speaker, having conducted seminars, professional training, and consultancy services for companies and industries in strategic thinking, negotiation, strategic communication, and political and economic risk analysis.

As an opinion pundit, Prof. Han has produced and contributed to numerous programs on Turkish television and has authored articles as a columnist for newspapers such as Radikal, Referans, and Oksijen, as well as for online platforms such as Independent Türkçe and Gazete Pencere. Currently, he is a regular guest on Turkey’s major news channel NTV’s flagship show on politics “Political Affairs” and co-hosts “Nereden Nereye?” a show on history on Turkey’s first thematic history channel, TarihTV. Additionally, he continues to write regular columns for Ekonomi Gazetesi and is a commentator on “Kes Tıraşı!” an online political and economic analysis program on the popular Turkish internet media on finance BlackSwan Finans. Prior to these, he served as an international relations advisor to the Turkish Exporters Assembly from 2003 to 2006 and as a member of the advisory board of the Turkish-American Business Council between 2020 to 2024.

In addition, in 2013, Prof. Dr. Ahmet Kasım Han addressed the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Dubrovnik on Eastern Mediterranean energy resources and served as an international observer for NATO in Afghanistan in 2005 and 2010. He has also participated, designed, and managed crisis management, counterterrorism, and strategic management programs for international organizations and governments, including NATO. While Prof. Han continuous to take responsibility in higher education through his academic work and administrative roles, he also constantly contributes to the development of global business relations and intercultural understanding with the insights he provides. Furthermore, through his commentary at the intersection of global strategy, energy policy, and economic risk, he strives to serve the constructive shaping of global dialogue, policy, and public discourse.