Suat Kınıklıoğlu has been a member of the AK Party Central Executive Committee since 2009 and is the Director of the Center for Strategic Communication (stratim). He served as Member of Parliament from 2007 to 2011 and was AK Party Deputy Chairman of External Affairs. Mr. Kınıklıoğlu was also the spokesman of the Turkish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and Chairman of the Turkey-US Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Group.

 

Mr. Kınıklıoğlu is currently a columnist for Today’s Zaman, an English-language daily, and is a frequent contributor to international media outlets. Mr. Kınıklıoğlu began his career as Liaison officer in the Turkish Air Force in 1986. He worked in a number of embassies in Ankara as a political consultant before setting up the Ankara Center for Turkish Policy Studies in 2002. The same year he became editor of the English-language quarterly journal Insight Turkey. In 2004 he was invited to be a Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington. Following his fellowship he became the Founding Director of the German Marshall Fund office in Ankara which he set up in 2005. Mr. Kınıklıoğlu earned a B.Sc. in Electronics from the Turkish Air Force Academy in Istanbul, Turkey, a B.A. in Political Science from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and his MA in International Relations from Bilkent University, in Ankara. He is currently pursuing his PhD at Keele University in the U.K. He speaks English, German and Russian, and is married and with two children.