Dr. Gün Güley, 2019

Gün Güley holds a PhD in Political Theory from Hamburg University. Her dissertation, Denizenship and its Discontents: Immigration, Citizenship, and Voting Rights in the Era of Cosmopolitan Nationalism, explores the extent to which non-citizen residents are excluded from voting rights within liberal-democratic nation-states and shows in which ways this disenfranchisement has problematic implications for basic norms of representative democracy and citizenship. Furthermore, it discusses the most prominent democratic principles used to propose denizen enfranchisement, argues why they fail to be convincing and develops an alternative, the All Stakeholder Principle, a denationalized version of Rainer Bauböck’s All Citizen Stakeholders Principle. This principle of inclusion grounds non-citizen residents’ claims for voting rights in legislative decisions and thereby aims to correct the abovementioned democratic deficit. 

Gün conducted her dissertation research as a PhD Fellow of the interdisciplinary graduate group Normative Assessment and Modeling of Collective Decisions at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences and the Department of Philosophy at Hamburg University. Her research also benefited from a previous visit to the MPI MMG and its Department of Ethics, Law and Politics. She has worked as an Adjunct Professor of International Relations and Political Theory at Hult International Business School in London and has been a lecturer of Political Theory at Hamburg University and a lecturer of Philosophy of Science at Leuphana University.

Gün is currently working on a book manuscript building on her dissertation research and further developing two key research topics. Firstly, she investigates the feasibility of a separation of legislative and constitutional demoi and how this would impact existing voting systems, immigration policies and norms and practices of political membership. Secondly, she further qualifies the normative conceptions and values of citizenship, identity, and inclusion that her All Stakeholder Principle is based on to develop a positive Theory of Stakeholder Membership.