The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world. ...

In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was...

The theme for an exhibition that opened on June 4, 2026, at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye), World’s First City Plan/Map, as part of my Arkeopolitics initiative, was met with reservations by a group of students from the Middle East...

Many people are overwhelmed by the fast-paced evolution of mass communication in a world increasingly shaped by the internet and artificial intelligence (AI). Yet ideas have not always circulated across the globe at lightning speed. ...

Inequality and Urbanism Today’s cities are hotbeds of inequality. Urban real estate is one of the most expensive kinds of land in the world. It attracts billionaires looking to store their wealth and hedge funds looking to garner predictable returns: New York’s avenues, Paris’s thoroughfares, and...

Political debates about democracy often focus on culture, leadership, or polarization. But history points to a more prosaic—and more powerful—driver of political outcomes: how governments raise revenue. ...

Standing in the dust of Çatalhöyük—a 9,000-year-old Neolithic site known to archaeology since the 1960s, yet virtually non-existent in discussions about political science and law—a question haunted me: “How come no one told us about it?” ...

In the heart of Ankara, less than a kilometer apart, stand two pillars of Turkish academia: the Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye) and the Faculty of Language and History-Geography (DTCF). Mülkiye was established in 1859 to navigate the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic relations with...

When we think of premodern governance, we often default to an image of concentrated authority: imposing rulers presiding over intricately layered hierarchies—pharaohs, emperors, and kings whose power seemed inseparable from the territorial and demographic scale of the states they commanded. This imagery reinforces a widely...

We are not facing separate crises, but the simultaneous collapse of multiple historical orders unfolding in the present. ...