Murat Yeşiltaş completed his BA and MA at the Department of International Relations of Sakarya University, in 2003 and 2009, respectively. He earned his PhD at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Marmara University in 2012. Yeşiltaş was a visiting researcher at the Department of European Studies and International Politics of Lancaster University between 2008 and 2009, and at Virginia Tech’s Institute of Government and International Affairs between 2010 and 2011. He served as an academic advisor for the Center for Strategic Studies (SAM) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey between 2012 and 2014. Currently, Yeşiltaş is an associate professor in the Middle East Institute at Sakarya University. He also holds the position of director of security studies at SETA Foundation, Ankara, Turkey. Yeşiltaş’s current research is on critical geopolitics, ethnic/religious radicalization, geopolitics of non-state conflicts, terrorism, and Kurdish affairs. He is currently working on a research project on Kurdish geopolitical space and on the New Regional Security Project (NRSP). His most recent books are Non-state Military Actors in the Middle East: Ideology, Strategy and Geopolitics (Palgrave McMillan, 2017); Türkiye Dünyanın Neresinde? Hayali Coğrafyalar Çarpışan Anlatılar (Where is Turkey Located? Imagined Geographies, Competing Narratives) (Koc University Press, 2015); and Geopolitical Mentality and the Military in Turkey (Kadim, 2016).
Necdet Özçelik has completed his MA at Atılım University and he is currently a PhD candidate at Middle East Studies at Ankara Social Science University. He retired from the Turkish Armed Forces in 2014 after serving 21 years. Özçelik completed numerous tours of duty in domestic and foreign operations in Turkey, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan during his service in Turkish Special Forces. He also served at Turkish Armed Forces Attaché Office at Turkish Embassy in Washington, DC, USA. In addition to national military trainings, he also trained at U.S. Army Special Forces at JFK Special Warfare Center and School in USA and NATO International Special Training Center in Germany. He has expertise in irregular warfare and his area of studies covers terrorism, C/T, insurgency, COIN, violent non-state actors and the nature of low intensity conflicts. Özçelik is a research fellow at the SETA Foundation in Ankara and he studies the PKK and other regional terrorist organizations. Özçelik is also the originator of Terrorism Analysis Platform (TAP) program which was developed by SETA and STM.
