TESAM (Center for Economic, Political and Strategic Research)

TESAM (Centre for Economic, Political and Strategic Research) is an independent non-governmental organisation and think tank based in Istanbul, Türkiye, established in 2016. Operating at the intersection of academic research and civil society action, TESAM conducts applied and policy-oriented research across the fields of social sciences, political science, international relations, economics, law and education.
TESAM's institutional infrastructure includes an internationally recognised publishing house (TESAM Yayınları), a peer-reviewed academic journal (TESAM Akademi), and a structured portfolio of youth-oriented academic programmes. TESAM Yayınları holds publisher status recognised by the Council of Higher Education (YÖK/ÜAK) and maintains a verifiable global distribution network: publications are indexed in EBSCO, catalogued in WorldCat/OCLC across more than 170 countries, and listed in Clarivate's Book Citation Index (Web of Science). This positions TESAM as one of the few civil society organisations in Türkiye with a genuinely international open-access publishing capacity.
In the field of youth engagement and education, TESAM organises the Annual Young Researchers Congress, Summer and Winter Schools, and structured student training programmes, providing a direct pipeline to an active community of young researchers and students aged 18–30. These programmes serve as operational platforms for piloting, validating, and disseminating project outputs in the Turkish context.
TESAM has experience in European cooperation projects and brings to partnerships a unique combination of capabilities: policy research expertise, academic publishing and dissemination infrastructure, youth and student programming, and established networks with Turkish universities and civil society organisations. TESAM is committed to the values of open access, democratic participation, and evidence-based policy engagement.