Gülçin is a Turkish political scientist and Senior Research Associate at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Institut für Sozialwissenschaften). She balances her institutional research with her role as the Academic Coordinator at the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy (CCRD). She holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Galatasaray University, a Master’s degree from the University Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, and a Ph.D. from the International Relations Program at Istanbul University.
Her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses primarily on authoritarianism, judicial independence, the rule of law, media capture, and digital censorship. From 2018 to 2021, she built comparative frameworks as an Einstein Guest Fellow at Humboldt University, analyzing how media control serves as a central symptom of democratic backsliding. Her work moved into the institutional core of judicial capture as part of the specialized research initiative “Judicial Autonomy Under Authoritarian Attack”. Her ongoing empirical work tracks the vulnerability of constitutional legal frameworks and investigates the specific, evolving roles lawyers occupy when defending civil liberties under autocratic stress.
A prolific socio-legal contributor to European governance debates, Coşkun frequently publishes expert analysis on constitutional law and democratic decay in outlets like the Verfassungsblog. Her recent academic volumes include co-editing Reclaiming Democracy in Cities: Resurgence from the Ground Up (Routledge, 2024), which provides a critical evaluation of urban social movements, participatory governance, and local resistance against state-level authoritarian pressures.