Welcome to The Center For Black Sea and Central Asia

The Center for Black Sea and Central Asia (KORA) at Middle East Technical University (METU) is one of Türkiye’s leading academic research centers dedicated to the study of the Black Sea region, the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and East and Central Europe. 
Established in 1992, KORA promotes interdisciplinary research, academic dialogue, and policy-oriented analysis on the political, economic, social, and geopolitical transformations shaping the post-Soviet region. 

KORA’s mission is to foster high-quality, interdisciplinary, and policy-relevant scholarship by bringing together academics, students, policymakers, and practitioners from diverse disciplinary and regional backgrounds. Building on METU’s strong tradition of scientific excellence, innovative research and international engagement, the Center promotes rigorous, comparative, and policy-relevant research that bridges disciplinary and regional boundaries.

Drawing on the expertise of scholars from political science, international relations, sociology, economics, management, education, engineering, and the natural sciences, KORA has cultivated a vibrant multidisciplinary research environment that combines theoretical depth with empirical and field-based inquiry. Through international conferences, workshops, seminars, publications, and collaborative research initiatives, the Center has become an important platform for scholarly exchange between Türkiye and the wider international academic community.

KORA has also played a pioneering role in graduate education in Türkiye. The Center initiated the establishment of the Eurasian Studies Graduate Program at METU, the first graduate program in Türkiye specifically dedicated to post-Soviet and Eurasian Studies. Designed with an interdisciplinary perspective, the program has trained generations of regional specialists equipped with strong analytical and methodological skills, linguistic competence, and extensive field experience. 

Since its foundation, KORA has developed extensive institutional cooperation with leading national and international organizations and has conducted numerous research projects funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), the British Council, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UNESCO, NATO, and successive European Union Framework Programmes. These projects have addressed a broad range of themes including regional cooperation, democratization, migration, gender, energy security, border studies, regionalization, political parties and civil society that often relied on long-term and multi-sited field research across the post-Soviet space. 

Through its interdisciplinary, internationally connected, and forward-looking approach, KORA fosters the integration of diverse theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and regional expertise to advance innovative scholarship, academic excellence, and collaborative research initiatives. In addition to its longstanding focus on political, economic, and social transformations across Eurasia, the Black Sea region, and Central Asia, KORA actively engages with emerging academic and policy debates on regional connectivity, energy security, digital transformation, geopolitical competition, migration, environmental challenges, democratic resilience, and the changing architecture of regional and global security. By encouraging dialogue across disciplines and between academia and policy communities, KORA contributes to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the evolving dynamics shaping the wider Eurasian space and its broader global implications[Y.