Hamid Akın Ünver

• PhD University of Essex
• Professor (Associate) at Özyeğin University

a systematic inquiry on the political impact of A.I., or whether algorithms will reinforce democracy or authoritarianism should take into account how decisions are made, regulated and overseen across different regime types. More critically, the role of A.I. in changing the power balance between political institutions, actors, and executive organs n...

This articles evaluates the claims of three main critiques of online political structures from a political engagement and resource generation perspective. The article argues that digital space is still very much a democratic space, albeit imperfect, that needs to address two fundamental issues: fixing metrics of digital engagement and bringing huma...

The structural shadow of uncertainty over diplomacy is stronger than ever. Some communicative rituals and practices of diplomacy are growing more obsolete, as modern political communication slides increasingly to short and sharp rhetoric, coupled with automation tools that bombard audiences at unprecedented levels. Diplomacy itself is hardly obsole...

This in-depth analysis (IDA) explores the most prominent actors, cases and techniques of algorithmic authoritarianism together with the legal, regulatory and diplomatic framework related to AI-based biases as well as deliberate misuses. With the world leaning heavily towards digital transformation, AI's use in policy, economic and social decision-m...

This article delves into the dynamics of a dyadic political violence case study in Rojava, Northern Syria, focusing on the conflict between Kurdish rebels and ISIS from January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2019. We employ agent-based modelling and a formalisation of the conflict as an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game. The study provides a nuanced under...

Does acquiring artificial intelligence (AI) technologies from the US or China render countries more authoritarian or technologically less advantageous? In this article, we explore to what extent importing AI/high-tech from the US and/or China goes parallel with importers' (a) democratization or autocratization, (b) state capacity, and (c) technolog...

This chapter seeks to contribute to this emerging debate by exploring disinformation in international relations as a rational actor problem. It situates information warfare as a dyadicdynamic interaction between the side that initiates disinformation (Attacker), the side that seeks to counter these efforts (Defender) and the international audience...

Many experts frame the debates around AI technology as a great power rivalry between the U.S. and China. Indeed, by most measures, the United States and China lead the world in AI innovation. Yet focusing solely on the United States and China elides global AI adoption dynamics and yields an incomplete picture about how and why countries acquire cer...

With the rise of digital platforms and the exponential growth of online information, fact-checking has undergone a significant transformation, relying heavily on technological advancements. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have revolutionized fact-checking processes, enabling the analysis of vast amounts of textual...

The transformative potential of blockchain technology, for example, also presents a promising path towards tamper-resistant information dissemination, safeguarding content from unauthorized alterations and ensuring its provenance. The tamperproof nature of blockchain ensures that the data presented is authentic, helping to counter misinformation an...

This chapter explores some of the current debates on conflict event data creation and analysis, how to use social media data as a form of conflict data, and how both rapidly emerging fields can assist forced migration scholars. It starts out with a comparison of the most commonly used conflict event datasets in the field, including their comparativ...

Human migration is an important societal issue with wide-ranging implications, and timely and accurate insights are increasingly needed for understanding the key factors to ensure the well-being of populations. New data sources, such as usage data from mobile phones and applications, remote sensing and satellite images, social media, event and news...

Following the large-scale 2015-2016 migration crisis that shook Europe, deploying big data and social media harvesting methods became gradually popular in mass forced migration monitoring. These methods have focused on producing 'real-time' inferences and predictions on individual and social behavioral, preferential, and cognitive patterns of human...

Following the Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, disinformation and fake news became popular terms to help generate domestic awareness against foreign information operations globally. Today, a large number of politicians, diplomats, and civil society leaders identify disinformation and fake news as primary problems in both domestic and fore...

Topic models are rapidly becoming popular in social sciences. However, researchers should pay attention to some critical steps while using these models. The format and content of the textual data, language, existence of covariates, and preprocessing steps are the most crucial elements of a topic model analysis. This study inspects the effect of var...

Why do countries engage in disinformation campaigns even though they know that they will likely be debunked later on? We explore a core puzzle in information warfare whereby countries that pursue disinformation to confuse and demobilize their adversaries usually suffer from reputational penalties after they are debunked, yet they nonetheless contin...

The US and China grew locked into a competition over global A.I. dominance, both trying to maximize their respective capacities and exporting their own products to the world. Both countries prioritize capitalizing on the rapid growth in computing capacity, producing and processing increasingly bigger datasets, develop newer and more sophisticated a...

Uluslararası İlişkilerde Metodoloji, teorinin ön planda olduğu son dönem Türk uluslararası ilişkiler öğretiminde öğrenci ve akademisyenlere metodolojinin de önemini hatırlatan bir derleme. 13 bölümde 17 yazarın, ilgilendikleri bilmeceleri çözme yolunda kullandıkları yöntemlerden nasıl haberdar olduklarını, bunları ne şekilde ve neden kullandıkların...

Following the Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections, disinformation and fake news became popular terms to help generate domestic awareness against foreign information operations globally. Today, a large number of politicians, diplomats and civil society leaders identify disinformation and fake news as a primary problem in both domestic and fore...

What determines whether a country imports high-technology artificial intelligence (A.I.) products from the United States and China? Over the last decade, a growing body of literature began focusing on regime types and argue that authoritarian countries tend to import A.I. from China, whereas democratic countries from the United States. In this stud...

There is broad academic consensus on the fact that the fragmentation of regions presents a significant challenge for the EU. Fragmentation undermines the authority of central states, the EU's most natural counterparts, and distributes it amongst a great number of actors-including non-state armed groups. To address fragmentation, the EU should incre...

The literature on online disinformation studies focuses disproportionately on the United States - especially on the 2016 Presidential elections – and has failed to generate an equally robust and diverse research agenda elsewhere.1 Empirical studies have drawn on a very narrow pool of cases, with the overwhelming majority of the scientific and polic...

In less than a decade, fact-checking around the world has grown into a new democratic practice, creating its own social and political institutions. Although the global awareness of, and demand for fact-checking grew after the 2016 US election and following European elections, the practice is as old as journalism itself. Fact-checking is generally v...

In recent years, computational research methods, digital trace data and online human interactions have contributed to the emergence of new technology-oriented sub-fields within International Relations (IR). Although the cybersecurity scholarship had an initial promise to be the primus inter pares among these emerging fields, the main thrust of this...

In recent years, computational research methods, digital trace data and online human interactions have contributed to the emergence of new technology-oriented sub-fields within International Relations (IR). Although the cybersecurity scholarship had an initial promise to be the primus inter pares among these emerging fields, the main thrust of this...

In recent years, Russian digital information operations, including disinformation, fake news, and election meddling have assumed prominence in international news and scholarly research outlets. A simple Google Trends query shows us that 'fake news' as a term enters into global mainstream lexicon starting with October 2016, peaking in the immediate...

This doctoral dissertation is a study of these discursive constructions and perceptions; more importantly, a study of the reasons and factors behind differing interpretations of the problem. Using the Kurdish conundrum in Turkey as a case, this study also seeks to provide an analytical framework for the analysis of the factors behind domestic and f...

Turkey and Russia have been developing comparable approaches to digital surveillance. The advent of Internet Communication Technologies (ICTs) and social media platforms have enabled significantly increased systematic state surveillance. From the state’s perspective, data-centric digital surveillance is required for two reasons. First, the extent a...

Leaders choose to mislead their domestic peers when the political risk and cost associated with a particular foreign policy decision is too great and when the structure of the political system in question is too leader-centric to afford these costs being incurred by the leader. This article argues that risk, uncertainty and imperfect information ar...

The traditional understanding of intelligence is the methodical collection of high-value information in a way that yields comparative advantage to decision makers.2 Such information can be on a foreign country’s capabilities, general global events, or a country’s domestic affairs. While most people tend to equate intelligence with military or secur...

Computational Social Science emerged as a highly technical and popular discipline in the last few years, owing to the substantial advances in communication technology and daily production of vast quantities of personal data. As per capita data production significantly increased in the last decade, both in terms of its size, bytes, as well as its de...

Computational Social Science emerged as a highly technical and popular discipline in the last few years, owing to the substantial advances in communication technology and daily production of vast quantities of personal data. As per capita data production significantly increased in the last decade, both in terms of its size, bytes, as well as its de...

Post-truth is a misnomer. Not only that it locates the political function of information wrong (within truth), it also omits a century of political psychology research in diagnosing the effects of realities in political behavior. This book chapter aims to anchor 'post-truth' as a concept back within the academic literature where it belongs: emotion...

No-go zones are gray areas in conflict settings where state weakening is followed by the emergence of violent non-state actors (VNSAs). These groups not only expel state security forces from the area but gradually start to take on the functions of the state, such as provision of security, law enforcement, and providing basic goods and services. The...

This article makes an empirical exposition of militancy governance under state failure by focusing on ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), YPG (People's Protection Units), Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic. Specifically, the article discusses how these groups mobilize different types of grievances and frame their propaganda...

The goal of this paper is to offer a new framework for conceptualizing the relationship between traditional channels of political expression and their adoption of emerging communication technologies to respond to the new challenges of digital crises. In doing so, it revisits the question "Are Digital Technologies Making Politics Impossible?", appro...

Discourse and politics on intra-state conflicts that involve one or many non-state armed actors usually take their form along two philosophical polarities. The hegemonic or state-centric position focuses exclusively on national security, terrorism and territorial integrity concerns, shunning other solutions to the problem as “treason” or “naiveté”....

Combining discourse analysis with quantitative methods, this article compares how the legislatures of Turkey, the US, and the EU discursively constructed Turkey's Kurdish question. An examination of the legislative-political discourse through 1990 to 1999 suggests that a country suffering from a domestic secessionist conflict perceives and verbaliz...

Continued inability of the international climate negotiations to reach a common resolution has been subject to academic and scientific research focus. These studies have focused on the ways of fostering cooperation and preventing free-riding in climate negotiations, through the development of balancing methods. This article first attempts to explor...

As the Middle East goes through one of its most historic, yet painful episodes, the fate of the region’s Kurds have drawn substantial interest. Transnational Kurdish awakening—both political and armed—has attracted unprecedented global interest as individual Kurdish minorities across four countries, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, have begun to shak...

The outcome of the March-April 2015 nuclear negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 (China, United Kingdom, France, Russia, United States, plus Germany) increased economic and trade optimism towards easing of sanctions on Iran. This optimism had a strong energy dimension in Europe, as the EU has long been scrambling to find alternatives to its depen...

Third parties have grown increasingly relevant in European politics in recent years, with the rise of status-quo changing parties such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, UKIP in Britain and the Front National in France. This article aims to bridge the gap in the comparative politics literature by introducing two new types of third parties in Eu...

This paper offers an introduction to the debate on data transfers and localization, why companies store data and how regulation-versus-localization shape the debate on data transfers. Then, it discusses more technical aspects of how governments regulate data transfers, why they want to localize data and the pitfalls of overregulation in data manage...

State weakening in Syria unearthed long-dormant processes of disenfranchisement, contributing to the regime’s loss of territory in the north-eastern half of the country. Out of this state weakening, two major armed non-state groups emerged: Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Both groups have uprooted the co...

The Kurdish question is one of the most complicated and protracted conficts of the Middle East and will never be resolved unless it is fnally defned. The majority of the Kurdish people live in Turkey, which gives the country a unique position in the larger Kurdish conundrum. Society in Turkey is deeply divided over the defnition and even existence...

The Kurdish question is one of the most complicated and protracted conflicts of the Middle East and will never be resolved unless it is finally defined. The majority of the Kurdish people live in Turkey, which gives the country a unique position in the larger Kurdish conundrum. Society in Turkey is deeply divided over the definition and even existe...

UmutUzer, Identity and Turkish Foreign Policy: The Kemalist Influence in Cyprus and the Caucasus (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011) Pp. 256. $96.00 cloth. - Volume 45 Issue 3 - Hamid Akin Ünver

This edited volume, comprising chapters by leading academics and experts, aims to clarify the complexity of Turkey’s Kurdish question. The Kurdish question is a long-standing, protracted issue, which gained regional and international significance largely in the last thirty years. The Kurdish people who represent the largest ethnic minority in the M...

Comparative and State-Centric Approaches to Kurdish Nationalism - Volume 45 Issue 1

This doctoral dissertation is a study of these discursive constructions and perceptions; more importantly, a study of the reasons and factors behind differing interpretations of the problem. Using the Kurdish conundrum in Turkey as a case, this study also seeks to provide an analytical framework for the analysis of the factors behind domestic and f...

This thesis analyzes the impact of the European Union (EU) on the Turco-Hellenic conflict. The theoretical foundation of this thesis is the link between EU enlargement, policies of conditionality and the process of ‘Europeanization’. The thesis makes the point that, apart from visible capabilities such as Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP),...