While shooting a documentary at Göbeklitepe, I encountered strikingly different historical interpretations of the site. An international group of New Age seekers seemed to be searching for extraterrestrial connections there, but when I pointed out that the enclosures had originally been roofed, they recast...

The oldest known engravings consist of zigzag patterns and parallel lines, carved into freshwater mussel shells at Trinil on the island of Java, Indonesia. These grooves, made by Homo erectus, date to roughly half a million years ago. By around 100,000 years ago, early...

As democracies around the world face mounting challenges and pressures, discussions about autocracy often focus on personalities and ideologies or tend to link governance practices to differences among specific cultural traditions. Yet a growing body of comparative historical research has provided evidence that a more...

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?” ...