Siyaset bilimci ve göç araştırmacısı olan Prof. Dr. M. Murat ERDOĞAN, Uluslararası Metropolis Danişma Kurulu Üyesi, UNESCO-Türkiye İletişim Komitesi üyesi ve İltica ve Göç Araştırmaları Merkezi’ne bağlı IGAM-ACADEMY Başkanıdır.
Prof. Erdoğan, 1987-2017 yılları arasında Hacettepe Üniversitesinde çalışmış, 2009 yılında Hacettepe Üniversitesi Göç ve Siyaset Araştırmaları Merkezini (HUGO) kurmuş ve 2017’ye kadar müdürlüğünü yapmıştır. 2017-2022 yıllarında Türk-Alman Üniversitesi’inde görev yapan ve burada Siyaset Bilimi ve Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölüm Başkanlığı ve kurucusu olduğu Göç ve Uyum Araştırmaları Merkezi (TAGU) Müdürlüğünü yapan Erdoğan; Mart 2022-Ekim 2024 arasında Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Mülkiye Göç Araştırmaları Merkezi’nin kurucu müdürü olarak görev yaptı. Akademik ilgi alanları iradi ve zorunlu göçler, mülteciler, yurtdışındaki Türkiye kökenliler, AB, siyasal karikatürler, siyasal davranışlar, İslamafobi, Almanya ve Türk dış politikası olan Prof.Erdoğan, Avrupa’daki Türk diasporası konusunda “Euro-Turks-Barometre”, Türkiye’deki Suriyeliler konusunda ise “Suriyeliler Barometresi” başlıklı kamsamlı ve düzenli kamuoyu araştırmalarını da yürütmektedir. 

Ayhan Kaya is Professor of Politics and Jean Monnet Chair of European Politics of Interculturalism at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University; Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence; and a member of the Science Academy, Turkey. He is currently European Research Council Advanced Grant holder (ERC AdG, 2019-2024). He received his PhD and MA degrees at the University of Warwick, England. Kaya was previously a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence, Italy, and adjunct lecturer at the New York University, Florence in 2016-2017. He previously worked and taught at the European University Viadrina as Aziz Nesin Chair in 2013, and at Malmö University, Sweden as the Willy Brandt Chair in 2011. He is specialised on European identities, Euro-Turks in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Circassian diaspora in Turkey, the construction and articulation of modern transnational identities, refugee studies in Turkey, conventional and nonconventional forms of political participation in Turkey, and the rise of populist movements in the EU. His recent manuscripts are Syrian Refugees in Turkey: Between Reception and Integration (Switzerland: Springer IMISCOE, 2023, co-authored with Z. Şahin-Mencütek, E. Gökalp-Aras, and S. B. Rottmann), and Populism and Heritage in Europe. Lost in Diversity and Unity (London: Routledge, 2019). His recent edited volumes are Nativist and Islamist Radicalism: Anger and Anxiety (London: Routledge, 2023, with Aysenur Benevento and Metin Koca); Memory in European Populism (London: Routledge, 2019, with Chiara de Cesari). Some of his books are Turkish Origin Migrants and their Descendants: Hyphenated Identities in Transnational Space (Palgrave, 2018), Europeanization and Tolerance in Turkey (London: Palgrave, 2013); Islam, Migration and Integration: The Age of Securitization (London: Palgrave, 2012); Contemporary Migrations in Turkey: Integration or Return (Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2015, in Turkish, co-edited with Murat Erdoğan), Belgian-Turks, Brussels: King Baudouin Foundation, 2008, co-written with Ferhat Kentel), Euro-Turks: A Bridge or a Breach between Turkey and the EU (Brussels: CEPS Publications, 2005, co-written with Ferhat Kentel, Turkish version by Bilgi University); wrote another book titled Sicher in Kreuzberg: Constructing Diasporas, published in two languages, English (Bielefeld: Transkript verlag, 2001) and Turkish (Istanbul: Büke Yayınları, 2000). He also translated Ethnic Groups and Boundaries by Fredrik Barth and Citizenship and Social Classes by T. H. Marshall and Tom Bottomore to Turkish language. He also edited several books on migration, integration, citizenship, and diasporas. Kaya’s publications have been translated to several languages such as French, German, Japanese, Italian, Arabic and Dutch. Kaya was actively involved in two FP7 and three Horizon 2020 projects, and now he is involved in two different Horizon 2020 research projects on migration. Kaya received Turkish Social Science Association Prize in 2003; Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA-GEBİP) Prize in 2005; Sedat Simavi Research Prize in 2005; Euroactiv-Turkey European Prize in 2008, the Prize for the best Text Book given by TÜBA; and also the Prize for excellence in teaching at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University in 2013 and 2017. 

Prof. Dr. Sebnem Koser Akcapar is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at the Social Sciences University of Ankara, Turkey (ASBU). She also acts as the Director of the Global Migrations Research Center (ASBU-GAUM). Before joining the ranks of ASBU, she worked as a faculty member in the Sociology Department and as a senior research fellow and executive board member at the Migration Research Center (MiReKoc) at Koc University, Istanbul. She is the founding Director of the Center for Asian Studies (KUASIA) and an Associate Member at the Asia Centre at the University of Sussex. After completing her PhD in Belgium, she moved to the United States as a post-doc fellow at the Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University. She taught graduate courses on Gender and Migration, Muslim Immigrants in Western Europe and North America, Politics of Migration, and Integration Problems at Georgetown University at the School of International Service, at the Center of German and European Studies. She was later appointed as the Director of the Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Georgetown University. She also worked as a visiting professor between 2013 and 2015 at Jawaharlal Nehru University and South Asian University in New Delhi, India, and taught on diaspora and transnationalism as well as social stratification in Asia. She published many articles in peer-reviewed academic journals on different aspects of migration. Her research areas include irregular migration, sociology of religion, gender and migration, forced migration, labor migration, highly skilled migration, social networks in migration, diaspora formation, and political mobilization. Her current projects include Ukrainian refugees and gender dynamics, migrant workers in Turkey from Central Asia, and climate and disaster-induced migration. Since March 2025, she is affiliated with the Geneva Graduate Center in Switzerland as Visiting Senior Fellow. 

Damla Bayraktar Aksel, İstanbul Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi Siyaset Bilimi ve Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümü'nde öğretim üyesidir. Aksel, Siyaset Bilimi ve Uluslararası İlişkiler alanında doktora derecesini Koç Üniversitesi'nden almıştır. Sciences Po Paris'ten Kamu Politikası alanında yüksek lisans derecesi ve Galatasaray Üniversitesi'nden Sosyoloji alanında lisans derecesi almıştır. Araştırma alanları arasında göç yönetişimi, ulusötesicilik, diasporalar, düzensiz göç ve uluslararası göç bağlamında AB-Türkiye ilişkileri yer almaktadır. "Home States and Homeland Politics: Interactions between the Turkish State and its Emigrants in France and the United States" (2019) adlı kitabın yazarıdır.

Hakan Gülerce completed his master's degree at Istanbul University, Department of Social Structure-Social Change in 2012 with his thesis titled “The Role of Editing in the Development of Social Sciences and a Sociological Study on Academic Journal Editors”. He graduated from the Department of Sociology of the same university in 2017 with his doctoral thesis titled “The Reproduction of Christianity in the Encounter with Modernity”. In 2018, Gülerce started to work as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Harran University and continued her postdoctoral studies in the fields of migration, social cohesion, youth studies, modernity and religion.

Gülerce received the title of associate professor in the fields of Sociology of Migration and Sociology of Religion in 2022. Gülerce, who is the director of Harran University Migration Policies Application and Research Center, has been and continues to be the coordinator of various projects on migration, forced migration, Syrians in Turkey and social cohesion in this center.

Gülerce, who served as the secretary general of the International Federation of Social Science Organizations between 2012-2019, assumed the presidency between 2019-2023.  He is currently a board member of the same organization.

English 

Zeynep Şahin Mencütek is currently a Senior Researcher at Bonn International Centre for
Conflict Studies (BICC) in Germany. She co-leads a Horizon Europe project, called GAPs on migrant returns and return policies. She is also a Research Affiliate with the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Toronto Metropolitan University and conducts joint research on the thematic area of Governance of Migration in a Globalizing World. She held the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers (June 2020–May 2021) and an international fellowship at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research in Duisburg (2019–2020). Previously, she worked as an Assistant Professor in Turkey, and in 2018 achieved the rank of Docent in the field of international relations. Zeynep received her PhD in politics and international relations from the University of Southern California in 2011. Her research interests include politics of migration, migration governance, return migration and Middle East politics. She has published in a wide variety of international peer-reviewed journals in the fields of migration and international politics, Besides dozens of book chapters, she also published a monograph, Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East(Routledge 2018) and recently co-authored the book, Syrian Refugees in Turkey (IMISCOE Series, 2023) and an edited volume titled, Migration and City ( IMISCOE Series, 2024). She is the associate editor of Journal of Migration Studies and board member of Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies.