Ihsan Yilmaz , Ph.D., will discuss the “Current Crisis in the Middle East: Turkey’s Foreign Policy and Domestic Issues” at 6 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 14 at the UMKC School of Law, E.E. (Tom) Thompson Courtroom.

Dr. Yilmaz will talk about the challenges to civil society, press freedom, freedom of speech, and pluralistic democracy in the aftermath of the August presidential elections. Other domestic issues, such as the Kurdish issue and abuses of power against the individuals and civil society, will also be covered.

Dr. Yilmaz is an associate professor of political science at Fatih University, Istanbul, Turkey where he also is the director of the Ph.D. Programm in political science and international relations at the university’s Institute of Social Sciences. He worked at the University of Oxford as a Fellow between 1999 and 2001 and taught Turkish government and politics, legal sociology, comparative law and Islamic law at SOAS, University of London between 2001 and 2008.

He is the author of  “Muslim Laws, Politics and Society in Modern Nation States: Dynamic Legal Pluralisms in England, Turkey and Pakistan” (2005). He is the editor of Turkish Journal of Politics (TJP) and a regular columnist of Today’s Zaman, an English language daily published in Turkey.

RSVP at kansascity@thedialoginstitute.org by Nov. 12.