Burcu KARAKAŞ
Invetigative journalist
Burcu Karakaş is an Istanbul-based investigative journalist with more than 15 years of experience covering human rights, migration, gender, and religion.
She has reported for Reuters, Deutsche Welle, and the Turkish daily Milliyet, producing field-driven stories grounded in people’s lived realities.
Her cross-border investigations, conducted with teams such as Bellingcat and Lighthouse Reports, have exposed forced returns at European Union borders and labor exploitation in global supply chains.
A two-time recipient of the European Union Investigative Journalism Award, Burcu has also been a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington and a Logan Nonfiction Fellow. She is the author of five books on minority rights and Turkey’s media landscape. Burcu holds an MA in International Relations and Communication from Boston University and has taught journalism at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul. She is a 2025/26 Mercator-IPC Fellow.