Soli Özel holds a BA in Economics from Benningon College (1981) and an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS-1983).

He is currently a senior lecturer at Istanbul Kadir Has University. He was a Bernstein Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School and a visiting lecturer in the Political Science Department of Yale. He has been a columnist at Nokta magazine and GazetePazar, Yeni Binyıl, Habertürk and Sabah newspapers. Currently he writes for T24, DuvarEnglish and Yetkin Report as well as the blog of Institut Montaigne. He held fellowships at Oxford, the EU Institute of Strategic Studies and was a Fisher Family Fellow of the “Future of Diplomacy Program” at the Belfer Center of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He taught at SAIS, University of Washington, Northwestern University and Hebrew University. He was a Richard von Weizsacker fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin between 2015-2017 and a visiting fellow at Institut Montaigne in Paris in 2018.

Most recently he published “US-Turkey Relations since WWII: From Alliance to Transactionalism”, The Oxford Handbook of Turkish Politics co-authored with Serhat Güvenç and “The Economics of Turkey-Russia relations” co-authored with Gökçe Uçar for EDAM, “How the Syrian Civil War shifted the balance of power in Turkish-Israeli relations”, co-authored with Selin Nasi, “The Transatlantic Drift and the Waning of Turkey’s ‘Strategic Westernness’ for Heinrich Böll Stiftung, co-authored POLITICS OF POPULISM: POWER AND PROTEST IN THE GLOBAL AGE” with Evren Balta

The Crisis in Turkish-Russian Relations, “The Kurds in the Middle East” with Arzu Yılmaz, in SIPRI Yearbook 2017

An article co-authored with Serhat Güvenç, “US-Turkey relations 1945-2020: From alliance to transactionalism” will be published in an edited book on Turkey by Oxford University Press.

He is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.