Turkuler Isiksel (Ph.D., Yale) works in contemporary political theory and is particularly interested in political institutions beyond the nation-state.  Trained as a political theorist, Professor Isiksel combines the perspectives of normative theory, legal analysis, and institutionalist political science in her research. She is particularly interested in how descriptive and normative categories tailored to the nation-state apply to institutions which wield political power beyond that context. Other research interests include Enlightenment political philosophy, particularly the evolution of ideas about commerce and international politics in the 18th century, as well as theories of sovereignty, citizenship, human rights, constitutional theory, and Turkey-EU relations.

During the 2010-2011 academic year, Professor Isiksel served as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Study at the European University Institute, where she was affiliated with the Global Governance Program. At the GGP, she worked on a project titled “Citizens of a new agora,” which maps practices of political participation emerging under the auspices of international economic institutions. Building on an idea borrowed from the EU context, this project argues that private economic actors function as “market citizens” within transnational institutions, particularly through claiming rights and entitlements before the dispute settlement mechanisms of regimes such as the WTO, NAFTA, and investment treaties.

Professor Isiksel is concurrently at work on a book manuscript which evaluates the extent to which constitutionalism, as a normative and empirical concept, can be adapted to supranational institutions. Her book will address this question in the light of the European Union’s legal order, arguing that the economically-driven process of European integration has brought into being a qualitatively distinct form of constitutional practice. Whereas existing research works within two dominant paradigms of constitutionalism (the limited government and popular sovereignty models), this book will propose a third model, that of “functional constitutionalism,” as better-suited to characterizing postnational legal orders driven by a pragmatic logic of credible commitment.