Güneş Murat Tezcür
Güneş Murat Tezcür is a political scientist and the chair of at the University of Central Florida, the first and only academic unit in North America dedicated to the study of Kurdish issues.
His research revolves around Middle East politics with a specific focus on political violence, Islamic politics, and democratization in Iran and Turkey. He has also extensively published on the Kurdish question. Furhthermore, Tezcür is the editor of .
His best-known work is on the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey in which he explains why ordinary individuals take risk and join the insurgency. The work is based on an original dataset involving biographies of thousands of militants. He argues that the ethnic cleavages do not matter by themselves but they become politically salient when individuals from a particular ethnic minority face state repression and see their ethnicity and identity under threat.
