Please join the Fletcher Eurasia Club for a lunch seminar with visiting scholars Pavel Luzin and Özgür Özkan about military reform in Russia and Turkey. Their presentations will compare military transformations and civil-military relations in Russia and Turkey during the last two decades under the rule of Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, respectively. The conversation will also evaluate Russia’s weakened armed forces amid the war in Ukraine, Russia’s ability to continue posing a threat to NATO and the liberal international order, and Turkey’s military operations in Iraq and Syria.

We encourage you to read Luzin’s 2023-2025 forecast on Russia’s military industry for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), his latest assessment of Russia’s defense and security budgets for the Jamestown Foundation, and Özkan’s earlier articles for Foreign Policy about the politicization of Turkey’s military following the 2016 coup attempt and its lackluster response to the 2023 earthquake. The Eurasia Club weekly lunch seminar series engages with students, faculty, staff, and researchers to foster a better understanding of the region among members of the Fletcher community. Members of the wider Tufts community are also welcome to attend. Lunch will be served. Register via myFletcher.

Pavel Luzin, Ph.D. in international relations (IMEMO, 2012), is a researcher of Russia’s foreign policy and defense, space policy, and global security issues. Luzin is a visiting scholar at The Fletcher School (USA) and a contributor to the Foreign Policy Research Institute (USA), the Jamestown Foundation (USA), and Riddle (Intersection Foundation, Lithuania). In 2017–2018, he was a consultant on armed forces, law enforcement agencies, and defense industry issues for Alexei Navalny’s presidential campaign. In 2016–2018, he was a consultant on Russia’s domestic politics for the “Nations in Transit” project at Freedom House (USA). In 2013–2014, Luzin was a research fellow at IMEMO (Russia). In 2013, he was an assistant to the editor-in-chief of the Security Index journal at PIR Center (Russia). Luzin was also a lecturer and senior lecturer at Perm State University (Russia) in 2010–2017, a senior lecturer at HSE (Perm campus, Russia) in 2011–2013, and a visiting assistant professor at HSE (Perm campus, Russia) in 2018–2019.

Özgür Özkan is a research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy school and a visiting scholar at The Fletcher School. He holds a Ph.D. in International Studies from the University of Washington, Seattle and an M.A. in Regional Security Studies (Russia-Eurasia) from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Before pursuing an academic career, he served as an officer in the Turkish army and NATO. Özgür’s research lies at the nexus of international security and comparative politics with a regional specialization in Turkey and the Middle East. Özgür is working on a book project based on his dissertation exploring officer recruitment and promotion patterns and their interaction in international and intrastate conflicts in Turkey since the late Ottoman period. Özgür published a book chapter and has several articles in the process of publication on the causes and consequences of the military’s representativeness and effectiveness. His policy-relevant research has appeared in Foreign Policy magazine and The Conversation.