László Szerencsés

About me

László Szerencsés is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University. His research focuses on the foreign policy of semi-authoritarian states with a geographical focus on Turkey, Hungary, and the Western Balkans. He is particularly interested in the role of bureaucracies in foreign policy making under authoritarian conditions. His work is based on extensive field research carried out in Turkey, Kosovo, Serbia, Hungary, and Germany. 

He completed his PhD in Law and Politics at the University of Graz, specializing in international relations. His PhD dissertation explored Turkey’s foreign policy in Kosovo and Serbia (2013–2020). He holds an MA in Global Political Economy from the University of Kassel, and a BA in International Relations from the Budapest Business University. 

Before joining Stockholm University, he was a Mercator-IPC Fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center at Sabanci University. In spring 2023, he was a Bluebook trainee at the European External Action Service (EEAS) Turkey/Eastmed division. In 2021-22 he was a DAAD guest researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen. In 2019, he worked as a project assistant in the project Migration-Integration-Religious Diversity (MIR) at the University of Graz. Prior to this, he interned at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington, DC, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Budapest, and the Embassy of Hungary in Berlin.