Prof. ABDÜRREŞİT CELİL KARLUK

Abdürreşit Celil Karluk was born in Kashgar, East Turkestan. He completed his BA in the Turkology department at Minzu University of China in Beijing from 1990 to 1995. He subsequently earned his MA and PhD at Hacettepe University's Department of Sociology in Türkiye from 1997 to 2003. Between 1995 and 1997, he worked as an expert at the Chinese State Ethnic Affairs Commission. From 2003 to 2014, he held the positions of Assistant Professor (2004-2006) and Associate Professor (2006-2014) in the Department of Sociology at the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Minzu University of China in Beijing. He has also conducted research at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia (2008-2009), the Indiana University Center for Eurasian Studies in the USA (2010), and the University of Sheffield in the UK (2024-2025). Due to the increasingly restrictive and marginalising policies towards non-Chinese groups under Xi Jinping's leadership, particularly the significant shift in Uyghur policy, Professor Karluk made the decision to resign from Minzu University of China in 2014 and relocated from China to pursue his academic career at Turkish universities. Since 2018, he has been a permanent professor in the Department of International Relations at Ankara Haci Bayram Veli University.

Professor Karluk's research interests include socio-cultural change, ethnicity and minority sociology, China studies, Türkiye–China relations, and the East Turkestan and Uyghur issue. He has published extensively in English, Turkish, Chinese, and Uyghur, authoring numerous scholarly articles and books. In recent years, his research has focused on themes such as Chineseness and the “others” in China, Chinese-style colonialism, diaspora and identity, and the Uyghur crisis.