Professor Umut Korkut
Head of EU Funded Projects
Department of Economics and Law
Umut Korkut is Professor of International Politics at Glasgow School for Business and Society at Glasgow Caledonian University.
He completed his DPhil (magna cum laude) at Central European University in Budapest in 2004. In 2009, he was awarded Associate Professorship by the Turkish Higher Education Council. He became professor in 2018. In the 2005-2006 term, he was a junior fellow at Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study. In 2015-2016, he was a visiting fellow of the Slavic-Eurasian Research Centre at Hokkaido University.
He has served the Political Studies Association (PSA) as Trustee and International Projects Lead. In 2018, he was elected to the executive committee of the International Political Science Association (IPSA). He served as the Vice-President of IPSA between 2021-2023 and authored the 2022 IPSA Gender and Diversity Monitoring Report based on a global survey involving 59 political science associations.
He is interested in how political discourse, aesthetics and visual imagery create audiences. He follows this theoretical interest across various empirical fields central to European politics and beyond such as migration and social inclusion, de-radicalisation, arts and culture as participatory democratic tools, internet studies, populism and everyday extremism. He has established expertise in Hungarian and Turkish politics.
In 2017, he published a book entitled “Politics and Gender Identity in Turkey: Centralised Islam for Socio-Economic Control” following the Foucauldian approach to study the construction of gender discourse in Turkish mosque sermons. His 2012 book entitled “Liberalization Challenges in Hungary: Elitism, Progressivism, and Populism was reviewed as “probably the best book to date” on Hungarian politics since 1990.
Following his theoretical and empirical research interests, currently he is the lead for Horizon 2020-funded project D.Rad. DeRadicalisation in Europe and Beyond: Detect, Resolve, and Reintegrate (2020-2024) and co-coordinator for UKRI/Horizon Europe funded project OppAttune: Countering Oppositional Political Extremism through Attuned Dialogue (2023-2026).
Since 2017 he has led three Horizon 2020 and Asylum, Migration, and Integration Fund funded projects. He was the lead coordinator for the AMIF-funded research project VOLPOWER: Volunteer and Empower: Enhancing Community Building and Social Integration through Dialogue and Collaboration amongst Young Europeans and Third Country Nationals (2018-2021).
He also served as the Principal Investigator for two Horizon 2020 funded projects named RESPOND: Multi-level Governance of Mass Migration in Europe and Beyond (2017-2021) and DEMOS: Democratic Efficacy and the Varieties of Populism in Europe (2018-2022) responsible for research on Hungary, Turkey and the United Kingdom.
Since 2017 he has supervised six PhD dissertations to graduation as the Director of Studies.
- Securitization of Migration in the Common European Asylum System and its Human Rights Implications: A Case Study of EU-Turkey Migration Deal – Tasawar Ashraf (Finished in 2021)
- The Role of Agency in the Securitisation of Migration: Policing in Hungary – Daniel Gyollai (Finished in 2021)
- The Stories that matter: Explaining Social Integration through everyday narratives – Doga Atalay (Finished in 2022)
- Making Audiences: The Turkish narrative on Syria and its effect on domestic audience in Turkey and elite audiences in the US – Tarik Basbugoglu (Finished in 2022)
- Labour Market Productivity in Scotland: Embedding inclusive growth within the “productivity puzzle” narrative - Ioannis Petrakis (Finished Autumn 2023)
- Cognitive Intuitions, Folk Ideas and Discursive Populism in the Brexit Referendum: Are Populist Ideas Cognitively Intuitive? – Bogdan Ionasev (Finished Autumn 2023)
At the moment, he is the director of studies for the PhD dissertations of David Jamieson and Roland Fazekas. He can supervise PhD dissertations on wider themes related to European and Middle Eastern politics.
Professor Korkut has an extensive experience with media and public dissemination. In the past, he has been interviewed on populism, Hungarian and Turkish politics, illiberalism, migration and wider international politics-related issues by UK, Chinese, Australian, Indian and other international media.