Dr. Can Öztaş is a retired Turkish diplomat and jurist who has spent his life moving between the corridors of diplomacy and the classrooms of academia—always in search of the space where power meets reflection, and governance encounters resistance.
During nearly three decades at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Türkiye, he served at Turkish missions in Sana’a, Strasbourg, and London, before returning to Ankara to take on senior roles such as Chief Consultant to the Deputy Minister, Government Agent before the European Court of Human Rights, and Head of the United Nations Department. His final posting was as Head of Digital and Institutional Communications, where he saw how words, too, can become instruments of strategy, and how narratives often travel faster than diplomats.
He holds an LL.M. in Public International Law from King’s College London and a Ph.D. in Law from Birkbeck, University of London. He also spent a year at Sciences Po in Paris, lecturing and contributing to the work of its Clinique Juridique. Dr. Öztaş is a Distinguished Humphrey Fellowship Alumnus and a member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) network at Harvard Law School. Since 2012, in the periods when he served at the Ministry in Ankara, he also worked as a visiting lecturer at the Law School of Ankara University, guiding students through the uneasy marriage of law, politics, history, and theory.
His interests wander across Turkish foreign policy, international law, legal rhetoric and memory, digital and communication sovereignty, and the aesthetics of resistance. His academic work draws on critical and postcolonial theory, particularly Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), and engages with the writings of Martti Koskenniemi, Costas Douzinas, Anthony Anghie, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hannah Arendt.