Z. Umut Türem is currently a visiting researcher at the Departments of Education and Near Eastern Studies of the University of Vienna. Dr. Türem holds a PhD from the Institute for Law and Society of New York University. Before coming to Vienna, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies (2009-2010) and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Legal Studies Department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2011-2012). Finally, he served first as an Assistant and later as an Associate Professor of Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University’s Atatürk Institute for ten years (2012-2022). His main areas of interest are sociology of law, modern Turkish history, international/global political economy, and “the state” as a theoretical and empirical object of research. His latest research examines authoritarian political formations and their legal and socio-economic foundations, particularly in the semi-peripheries of global political economy. He has co-edited The Making of Neoliberal Turkey (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016), and he has published various book chapters and peer reviewed articles in notable journals including Law and Social Inquiry, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, and Journal of International Relations and Development.