Suat Kiniklioglu was appointed executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s new office in Ankara, Turkey, in 2005. He has a weekly column in the English daily Today's Zaman and is editor of Insight Turkey, a quarterly publication on Turkish foreign policy issues. He previously worked on Black Sea security and strategic issues as a Transatlantic Fellow with the GMF in Washington, D.C. Mr. Kiniklioglu comes to GMF from the Ankara Center for Turkish Policy (ANKAM), where he served as the center’s founding director. Before his recent tenure at ANKAM, Mr. Kiniklioglu worked as a development officer responsible for Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan at the Canadian International Development Agency, based in Ankara. Prior to that, he was a senior political and economic research officer at the Australian Embassy in Turkey. He has also worked as a foreign policy correspondent for the Turkish newspaper Yeni Yuzyil. Mr. Kiniklioglu holds the rank of division/liaison squadron commander in the Turkish Air Force, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Bilkent University. He received a Master of International Relations from Bilkent University and a B.A. in political science from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He also holds a bachelor’s degree in electronics from the Turkish Air Force Academy in Istanbul. He is fluent in Turkish, English, German, and Azerbaijani, and is proficient in Russian.

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About the Discussants

Ian Lesser is a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and received his D.Phil from Oxford University. He came to the German Marshall Fund in November 2006 from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., where he leads a major project on the future of US-Turkish relations. He is also President of Mediterranean Advisors, LLC, and senior advisor to the Luso-American Foundation in Lisbon. Prior to establishing Mediterranean Advisors, Dr. Lesser was Vice President and Director of Studies at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles, and spent over a decade at RAND as a senior analyst and research manager specializing in strategic studies and Mediterranean security. From 1994-1995, he was a member of the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where his portfolio included southern Europe, Turkey, and the multilateral track of the Middle East peace process. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Atlantic Council of the U.S., the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the advisory boards of Turkish Policy Quarterly and the International Spectator, and is a former senior fellow of the Onassis foundation. At GMF, Dr. Lesser focuses on Turkey, the US-Turkey-EU triangle, strategies toward North Africa and the Mediterranean, and transatlantic cooperation on new security and public policy challenges.

Pinar Bilgin is a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is currently working on a project entitled "Globalization and Security in the Developing World: The Case of Turkey." She received a B.Sc. in International Relations at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, an M.A. in International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, an M.Sc. in Strategic Studies and a Ph.D. in International Politics at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth. She is currently an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University and was until recently also an Assistant Dean there. She previously served as a researcher at the General Secretariat of the Turkish National Security Council. Her publications include the book Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective; "Turkey's Changing Security Discourses: The Challenge of Globalisation," in European Journal of Political Research; and "From 'Rogue' to 'Failed' States? The Fallacy of Short-termism," in Politics, which was awarded UK Political Studies Association's annual prize for the best article published in Politics in 2004. Her areas of expertise include critical approaches to security, globalization and security in the developing world, Turkey's foreign and security policies, and regional security in the Middle East.

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