Biography
Dr Korkmaz worked at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) as a British Academy Fellow for two years, then as a Departmental Lecturer in the MSc in Migration Studies program. He was also a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall (2017-2020) and an affiliate of the Department of Political Science and International Relations’s Centre for Technology and Global Affairs (2018-2019). In 2016, Dr Korkmaz was awarded a PhD from Istanbul University’s International Relations PhD Programme.
As a political scientist and international relations expert, he is driven by a passion to shed light on the social and political impact of technological innovation, focusing on surveillance technologies in migration management, border security, and international development. His publications and research projects on AI and data science in migration management and international development directly relate to policy-making processes and create avenues of conversation with various policy-making agencies, from governments to NGOs and UN agencies. He examines these developments to contribute to a surveillance capitalism theory and aims to understand the evolution of contemporary capitalism.
He co-edited Data Science for Migration and Mobility — with Professor Albert Ali Salah (University of Utrecht) and Dr Tuba Bircan (University of Cambridge) — which was published by the Oxford University Press Proceedings of British Academy in November 2022.
His first monograph, “Smart Borders, Digital Identity and Big Data: How Surveillance Technologies Are Used Against Migrants”, was published by the Bristol University Press in December 2023.
His current research project with the World Food Programme was launched in October 2023. The project, “Using Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Techniques for Vulnerability Assessment, Targeting and Assurance in Humanitarian Action,” aims to resolve data scarcity during humanitarian emergencies in Africa and the Middle East and suggest new vulnerability assessment and targeting techniques. This project would provide practitioner-related outputs as our proposed methods will be tested and implemented directly on the ground.
Selected publications
The war in Gaza and testing war technologies on migrants
Blog | Transforming Society | 06/02/2024
Smart Borders, Digital Identity and Big Data: How Surveillance Technologies are used against Migrants
Book | 11/01/2024
Press Release
Using Social Media’s Data for Good: Analyzing the Economic Impact of the 2023 Earthquakes in Turkiye and Syria
Blog | Emre Eren Korkmaz & Brittney Butler | 30/11/2023