Şafak Baş, M.A., studied Political Science and Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the Ruprecht-Karls University in Heidelberg as well as Persian at the Dekhoda Lexicon Institute in Tehran. After completing his studies, he worked as a policy analyst at the European Stability Initiative in Berlin and Istanbul (2012-2013) and as a freelance journalist in Istanbul and Tehran (2013-2014). Currently, Şafak is a Ph.D. student at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at the Otto-Suhr Institute of Political Science at Free University Berlin.
In his dissertation project, which is funded by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Şafak is working on the foreign policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey in the Middle East. In addition to dissertation related topics of the foreign policies and geopolitics of Iran and Turkey, he is particularly interested in topics of the social sciences such as flight and migration. In this context, he visited the Turkish-Syrian border area between March and July 2015 and gathered numerous impressions and information on the situation of the Syrian refugees in Turkey in talks with politicians, helpers and refugees.
