Dr Banu Turnaoğlu

Banu’s research lies at the intersection of political theory, global intellectual history, international relations, and Ottoman political thought. She is primarily interested in the topics of republicanism, democracy, and imperialism and related questions of the nature and sources of the modern international order, more generally linking existing patterns of political development with contemporary events. She is the author of The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton University Press, 2017), which examines the origins and development of republican thinking and conceptions of the state within the intellectual and political context of the Ottoman Empire.

She is working on a new book manuscript, provisionally entitled The Eastern Question: A New History, which is under contract with Princeton University Press. It traces the deep roots of the “Eastern Question” – a defining international issue concerning the Great Powers’ rivalry over the territorial management of the Ottoman Empire – from its conceptual origins in the 1820s until after the First World War and explores its continued historical and political legacy in the Middle East, Europe and Caucasus today. It reconstructs the history of the Eastern Question with the combined perspectives of both West and non-West in an intertwined transnational discourse and over a longue durée. In examining the debates that this question generated on war and peace, the union of the states, civilisation, nationalism, and empire, the project offers insight into the way in which these ideas and dynamics reshaped the ideological bases of the modern international order.