Hakan Altinay

About

Hakan Altinay is a distinguished intellectual and champion of civic muscles including camaraderie, good conversation and commons. He is the founding director of the European School of Politics in Istanbul, which relied on inspiration from the Yale World Fellows Program in its methodology. Hakan taught at Istanbul's premier universities, served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a professor of the practice at Tufts University, and an academic visitor at University of Oxford. He is a member of the Depolarization Community of Practice at IFIT in Barcelona. His book, Global Civics: Responsibilities and Rights In an Interdependent World, reflects work done while at Yale and was published in 2011 by Brookings Institution, later translated into Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. The book also led to a documentary, directed by Jian Yi, another World Fellow, with viewers in 110 countries. His later writings were published in Turkish as a book, titled Medeni (Civic).  His current interests revolve around what can be achieved through good conversations and generous listening, as well as the opportunity cost of neglecting our civic muscles around these perennial practices.

Media and Commentary

• The miracle that is a conversation, European School of Politics
• Denying vs affirming interdependence, Global Policy, 2025