Dr Muzaffer Kutlay

Senior Lecturer in Law

School of Law, Policing and Social Sciences

Senior Lecturer in Law and Politics at CCCU, Canterbury and Board Member of Turkish Journal of Diaspora Studies. Research focuses on forced migration.

Dr Muzaffer Kutlay joined CCCU as Senior Lecturer in Law and Politics in April 2023. She previously held positions at the University of Oxford, where she worked as co-Investigator to the Oxford Belarus Observatory (OBO) (2021-23) Project and Research Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA).

Prior to that she was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate for the GCRF COMPASS (2017-19, £4mln), leading WP3 on Policy Impact and contributing to WP2 on Research Integration. The COMPASS project was highly commended by the Times Higher Education in 2021, under the category of the Best International Collaboration of the Year.

Before this, Muzaffer was a Lecturer in European Foreign Policy at King’s College London (2019–2021) and a Lecturer in East European Politics at the University of Kent, where she also served as a Research Assistant on the Horizon 2020 UPTAKE project (2017–2019).

She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent and an MA from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

She is the author of "The path to democratic reform: Bulgaria in comparative perspective" (London: Routledge, 2024).

She currently teaches the following UG and PG Modules:

  • P19019 Research Methods;
  • P12799 Contemporary Security: Theory and Practice;
  • P19019 Global Governance and Diplomacy.

She also contributes to the team teaching of the following modules:

  • U11830 International Justice and Human Rights;
  • P11671 Advanced Legal Research Methods;
  • U11828 EU Law

She welcomes applications for PhD projects on these topics:

  • Displacement studies with a focus on forced migration and voluntary return;
  • Inter-ethnic coexistence and minority rights;
  • European politics;
  • Country expertise: Turkey and Bulgaria.

Books:

  • Muzaffer Kutlay, The path to democratic reform: Bulgaria in comparative perspective (London: Routledge, 2024).
  • Mevsim, Hüseyin and Muzaffer Kutlay (eds.) Recording the ‘Unknown’ History: 1984 Forced Migration of Turks and Turkish-Bulgarian Relations (Ankara: USAK Publications, 2014). Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)

Journals:

  • Muzaffer Kutlay, “An Outlier Case of Forced Migration and Voluntary Return: Turks of Bulgaria”, International Migration, 55 no. 5 (2017): 162-179.

Book Chapters:

  • Neophytos Loizides and Muzaffer Kutlay, “The Cyprus Stalemate: Opportunities for Peace and Lessons from Turkish-Bulgarian Relations”, in Turkey’s Relations with its Neighbours, edited by Alexis Heraclides, (London: Routledge, 2019).
  • Kutlay, Muzaffer. “The Balkans and China” in Handbook of Politics in the Balkans, 5th edition, Şaban Çalış and Birgül Demirtaş Çoşkun (eds.) (Eskisehir: Anadolu University Publications, 2012).

Board Member of the Turkish Journal of Diaspora Studies, Migration Research Foundation, Ankara, Turkey