László Szerencsés, photo: private

László Szerencsés will join Stockholm University’s Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS) in January 2025 as a postdoctoral researcher in International Relations with a focus on security. His research investigates Turkey’s evolving role within NATO, exploring whether Turkey, as an authoritarian middle power, can balance its strategic autonomy and alliance commitments amidst growing polarization in international politics and internal divisions within the West.

Dr. Szerencsés earned his PhD in Law and Politics at the University of Graz (2024) with a dissertation examining Turkey’s foreign policy in Kosovo and Serbia from 2013 to 2020. His research draws on extensive fieldwork, emphasizing local actors’ agency in facilitating or limiting Turkey’s transnational authoritarianism in the Western Balkans. 

Prior to joining SUITS, he was a Mercator-IPC Fellow at the Istanbul Policy Center, where he worked on Turkey’s foreign policy in Germany and Hungary. He worked as a project assistant at the University of Graz in the Migration-Integration-Religious Diversity (MIR) project in 2019. He also gained policy experience as a Bluebook Trainee at the European External Action Service (Turkey/EastMed Division) and through internships at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington, DC, and the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

He holds an MA in Global Political Economy from the University of Kassel and a BA in International Relations from the Budapest Business University. His research interests span the effects of autocratization on foreign policy making, Turkey’s and Hungary’s foreign policy dynamics, the Western Balkans, and the evolving dynamics of international organizations under autocratizing regimes.