Kemal Kirişci

Kemal Kirişci is a nonresident senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe's Turkey Project at Brookings Institution, with more than three decades of academic and policy oriented research expertise in refugee studies, political economy of international trade, and foreign policy. From 2013 until 2020, he was the TÜSİAD senior fellow at Brookings and director of the Turkey Project. Kirişci ran the Turkey Project Policy Paper series and continues to write policy oriented commentaries on refugee and foreign policy related issues. Several of his reports and most recent commentaries advocate the idea of extending trade concessions to countries, such as Turkey, hosting large number of refugees in return for integrating refugees into local labor markets in a sustainable manner. His most recent 2023 article co-authored in the academic journal Turkish Studies discusses a century long asylum and refugee policies of Turkey. His book “Turkey and the West: Fault Lines in a Troubled Alliance” was published by the Brookings Institution Press in November 2017. He is also the co-author of "The Consequences of Chaos: Syria's Humanitarian Crisis and the Failure to Protect" (Brookings Institution Press, April 2016), which considers the long-term economic, political, and social implications of Syria's displaced and offers policy recommendations to address the humanitarian crisis. Before joining Brookings, Kirişci was a professor of international relations and held the Jean Monnet chair in European integration at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul.