Engin Isin, Professor Emeritus in International Politics, School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London.  Engin was a professor of social science (1996-2002) and Canada Research Chair (2002-2006) at York University, a professor of politics at The Open University (2007-2016), and a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London (2017-2022).  

Engin has written, spoken, and taught both on subjectivity, performativity, enactments and movements that emancipate peoples and on how cities, states, and empires accumulate subject peoples by dispossession, colonisation, and assimilation. Engin has undertaken historical and sociological studies of British imperial and colonial practices in Africa, America, Canada, Asia and Middle East, Ottoman imperial and colonial practices in Europe and Middle East and North Africa and French colonialism in Quebec, Haiti, and Algeria. Engin has also written about data empires of the 21st century.  

The driving force in all these studies has been the struggle between imperial, colonial or national designs for conduct of people and how people subvert these designs by performative acts and invent political subjectivities. Engin’s work always asks how people make themselves subjects of politics through acts, movements, and struggles and explores the tension between emancipatory possibilities of citizenship and citizenship as an institution of domination.  

Engin’s books include Cities Without Citizens (1992), Citizenship and Identity (1999) with Patricia Wood, Being Political (2002), Citizens Without Frontiers (2012), and Being Digital Citizens (2020 2nd ed.) with Evelyn Ruppert. He has edited Acts of Citizenship (2008) with Greg Nielsen, Enacting European Citizenship (2013) with Michael Saward, and Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (2014) with Peter Nyers. His latest edited books are Citizenship after Orientalism: Transforming Political Theory (2015) and Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights (2019) with Didier Bigo and Evelyn Ruppert.