Seda Gürkan is Senior Assistant Professor of International Relations and European Studies at Leiden University’s Institute of Security and Global Affairs and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. She holds a PhD from the Université libre de Bruxelles, a Master’s from the LSE, and is a graduate of the Diplomatic School of Spain’s Foreign Ministry. Before academia, she spent a decade at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, working on NATO-EU relations, counter-terrorism, and missile defence. Her research focuses on EU foreign policy, enlargement, EU-Turkey relations, and autocratisation in the EU’s neighbourhood. She co-edited Theorising the Crisis of the European Union (Routledge, 2021) and a 2024 Journal of European Integration special issue on emotions in EU foreign policy. Dr Gürkan currently leads the EUMOTIONS project and participates in two Horizon Europe initiatives, GEM-DIAMOND and RED-SPINEL, exploring democratic resilience and EU foreign policy.