Professor Zeynep Alemdar is the Dean of the Faculty of Business and Administrative Sciences and Head of the Gender Studies Research Center in İstanbul’s Okan University.
She is the founder and director of the Women in Foreign Policy (WFP14), an initiative to promote women’s voices on hard security issues to encourage female participation in foreign policy decision-making and to involve women at all levels of peacemaking, historical reconciliation and resolving frozen conflicts.
She is the former president and still serves on the executive board of the Turkey-EU Association and the Turkish Council of the European Movement, a preeminent independent civil society organization in Turkey to promote membership to the EU.
Her research examines the interaction between international and domestic politics, including civil society and democratization issues and Turkey-EU relations. Her policy-oriented work focuses on women, peace and security agenda and feminist foreign policy. She has extensive consultancy experience with the UNWomen, the European Union and the World Bank for gender equality, women’s empowerment and women’s leadership projects.
She is the recipient of the Next Generation Hurford Fellowship of the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Kentucky. She received her MA from Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce and her BA in economics from Université de Galatasaray in Istanbul.
