Dr Mertin Gurcan

Dr Metin Gurcan is a columnist for the Washington-based Al Monitor News Agency writing about security related issues and is a regular contributor to the Turkish T24 News Agency.

After graduating from the Turkish War Academy in 1998 with distinction, Dr Gurcan joined the Turkish Special Forces and served in the Southeast of Turkey, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Kosovo and Northern Iraq as a team commander, military adviser, and liaison officer between 2000 and 2008. In 2010, Dr Gurcan obtained an MA degree in Security Studies from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey with a thesis analyzing the center-periphery relationship between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurds with a focus on Kirkuk.

From 2010 to 2014, Dr Gurcan worked as an analyst officer at the Turkish General Staff. After resigning from the military in 2015, Dr Gurcan obtained his PhD from the Department of Political Science of Bilkent University in 2016 with a dissertation entitled ‘Opening the Blackbox: The Transformation of the Turkish Military’.

In 2014, Dr Gurcan worked as a visiting research fellow at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War (CCW) Program, and conducted research about the changing nature of conflict and counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in tribal and Muslim settings. Dr Gurcan has been published extensively in Turkish and foreign academic journals such as Turkish Studies, Small Wars Journal and Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, on issues such as perceptions on the changing nature of warfare, terrorism, Turkish civil-military relations, military history and Turkish foreign policy. Gurcan’s first book entitled ‘The Gallipoli Campaign:The Turkish Perspective’ and co-edited with  Prof. Robert Johnson of Oxford University was published by Routledge in April 2016. His second book titled “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan? Understanding Counter-insurgency in Tribalized Rural Muslim Environments” presenting a critique of COIN efforts in Afghanistan was published by Helion & Company in June 2016.