Pinar Bilgin is a Professor of International Relations at Bilkent University (Ankara, Türkiye) and a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences since 2012.
She holds:
• a PhD in International Politics from the University of Wales (Aberystwyth, United Kingdom);
• an M.Sc. in Strategic Studies from UWA University of Western Australia (Australia);
• an M.A. in International Relations from Bilkent University (Ankara, Türkiye);
• a B.Sc. in International Relations from Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Türkiye)
She is the author of Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective (2004; 2nd ed. 2019), The International in Security, Security in the International (2016); co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology (2017) and Asia in International Relations: Unthinking Imperial Power Relations (2017). Her new book (co-authored with Karen Smith) Thinking Globally About World Politics: Beyond Global IR will be out in 2024.
She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at WWIC, Washington DC in 2006-07 and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London in 2013-14. She was a senior research fellow at Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Centre for Global Cooperation Research in 2023. She was a visiting professor at the Center for Contemporary Middle East Studies of the University of Southern Denmark and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Resolution of International Conflicts (CRIC) at the University of Copenhagen during 2015-16. She was also a visiting professor at the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies at the University of Amsterdam in June 2019, a visiting professor at the Institute for International Relations (IRI) Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio) in August 2019, a visiting researcher at Leiden University’s Institute for Security and Global Affairs in June 2021, and a Global Fellow at St Andrews University in November 2022.
She has served as Associate Editor of Security Dialogue (2008-2013), International Political Sociology (2012-2017), and International Studies Quarterly (2019-2023). She serves as a member of the editorial board and/or the international advisory board of several academic journals, such as the European Journal of International Relations, Journal of International Relations and Development, Critical Military Studies, Geopolitics, International Relations, and Millennium: Journal of International Relations.
She is the co-editor (with Monica Herz) of the Palgrave book series Critical Security Studies in the Global South. Since 2021, she has served as the President of the World International Studies Committee.
She received the' best article published in Politics in 2004’ award from the Political Studies Association in 2005. She also receives the ‘GEBİP Young Scientist Award’ by the Turkish Academy of Sciences (2008) and ‘TUBİTAK Young Scientist Incentive Award’ by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (2009).
Professor Bilgin actively contributes to expanding political studies from a non-western approach. Her Turkish roots fueled her interest in the key role that the country and the broader Middle East play in shaping today’s global order.
With her article From ‘Rogue’ to ‘Failed’ States? The Fallacy of Short-termism, she inaugurated a broader reflection on West-centric labels in international politics. Bilgin highlights how the West errs in approaching such a delicate situation, starting from these narrow-minded classifications. Despite being two decades old, the article’s topics are still essential to grasp today’s geopolitical scenario.
In the post-Cold War years, Western concerns focused on countries whose foreign policy threatened the global order. Rogue states were considered universal enemies, similar to the communist threat during the Cold War. The US defined a state as “rogue” if it pursued an anti-US foreign policy, detained weapons of mass destruction, and used terrorist tactics.
In the same years, superpowers’ attention shifted away from many third-world states. They were considered just when they were on the brink of collapse. The response was to enforce a more vital state if its government aligned with Western interests or to classify it as rogue. The international community tended to consider state failure as collective failure, hence the moral responsibility to intervene (in these years, the UN endorsed the R2P norm).
However, as the new millennium approached, the US and its allies became increasingly worried about the failure of states. The vacuum left by the superpowers was filled by non-state actors such as terrorists and warlords, which increasingly weakened international security. This issue became crucial for Western countries, especially for those intervening in contexts such as Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen.
The issue highlighted by Bilgin is the over-simplification of the phenomenon of state failure in its complexity. Many first-world biases hinder the proper understanding of its causes and conditions. Westerners disregard factors attributable to them, such as arms trade, neoliberal developmental and assistance policies and their disinterest towards “peripheral” conflicts. This thesis, despite being two decades old, is still very relevant. In her most recent article, Against Eurocentric Narratives on Militarism, Bilgin explores the bias towards third-world conflicts, premises on Western normalisation of the idea that militarisation is alien to the post-1945 West.
Bilgin fights not only against Eurocentric, male-centred conceptions of conflicts but also against the Eurocentric conception of “state” and “failure”. The forced application of a Westphalian concept of state failed in many parts of the world: the dream of a European-like “progressive development of states” ended. The West, disillusioned, now tries to be less idealistic: it sustains governments regardless of their democracy, as strong states hinder the proliferation of international terrorism.
Bilgin invites us to be concerned about state failure even before it threatens the international order. She criticises narrow-minded analysis and short-term, repressive policies that the US and its allies adopted in these situations. It is essential to approach the issues of state failure with a multidimensional, strategic, encompassing, long-term approach. Furthermore, recent Western militarisation aims at achieving a repressive, short-term stance as it did 20 years ago: the increasing destabilisations of many regions prove the need for a different approach from the non-male-centered, non-Eurocentric one proposed by Bilgin.
https://pinarbilgin.me/ (personal website)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF6OSzlRLfbBnsK7yUfDQM6JMIkFV7tJK (YouTube playlist)
https://independent.academia.edu/BilginP%C4%B1nar (bibliography)
Pınar Bilgin on Non-Western IR, Hybridity, and the One-Toothed Monster called Civilization, (2013): http://www.theory-talks.org/2013/12/theory-talk-61.html