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.
Almost thirty years in diplomacy taught him that patience can be a profession, precision a form of self-defence, and that policy often appears only after the stories told in its name have already taken hold. His work carried him through the usual suspects of the international circuit, New York, Geneva, Strasbourg, but the work that shaped him most unfolded in places where diplomacy meets daily reality: Lefkoşa, Sana’a, Cotonou, and Apia, among others.
He holds an LL.M. in Public International Law from King’s College London and a Ph.D. in Law from Birkbeck College, University of London. A year at Sciences Po, École de Droit, as a visiting researcher, allowed him to move between international-law seminars and the work of the 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. From 2012 until his retirement from the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he also taught as a visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Law of Ankara University, guiding students through the shifting triangles of law, politics, and theory.
His interests drift across Turkish foreign policy, international law, and what he has come to think of as the quiet aesthetics of resistance, an attentiveness to what the main narrative leaves unsaid. His writing has appeared in Utrecht Law Review and Global Jurist. He also keeps a reflective guest column at Turkey in Depth and contributes occasionally to the Critical Legal Thinking website.