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, Karluk served as an expert at the State Ethnic Affairs Commission of China. From 2003 to 2014, he pursued his academic career at the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Minzu University of China, where he held the positions of Assistant Professor (2004–2006) and Associate Professor (2006–2014) in the Department of Sociology. He also served as a foreign faculty member in the fields of Sociology and Chinese Studies at several institutions, including the Center for Eurasian Studies at Indiana University, USA (2010), Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University (2011-2015), and the Turkish Military Academy (2013–2016).

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. From 2015 to 2018, Prof. Karluk worked as a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazit University. Since 2018, he has been serving as a Senior Professor in the Department of International Relations at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University. In addition, he conducted research projects on China as a visiting scholar at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia (2008–2009), and at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom (2024–2025).

Professor Karluk's research interests include socio-cultural change, ethnicity and minority sociology, China studies, Türkiye–China relations, and the East Turkestan studies. 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 (Uyghur Genocide).