Onur Arslan is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work bridges legal anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and political theory, with regional focuses on Turkey, the Middle East, and Europe. His work explores how people create new modes of governance and knowledge at the interfaces of digital and juridical worlds.

His current book project, Evidencing Terror: Law, Digital Forensics, and Remaking the War on Terror in Turkey is an ethnographic interrogation of a new authoritarian order emerging through digital evidentiary practices in counterterror settings. The project reveals how legal experts transform digital memories into vehicles of suspicion, creating new representations of terrorism while suppressing alternative political imaginations. 

Through immersive fieldwork conducted during Turkey’s post-coup state of emergency and the Covid-19 pandemic, he followed digital data from the moment they were extracted from different types of databases (phones, servers, surveillance systems) to their presentation as evidence in courts and media outlets. To do so, he observed unstable alliances and controversies among diverse array of actors including forensic examiners, police officers, prosecutors, judges, lawyers, and defendants. His work received generous support from the US National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Institution in Turkey, and other institutions.

Onur’s work appeared in American Ethnologist (2025), Environment and Planning (2022), and Science and Society (Toplum ve Bilim, 2018). He also wrote for public platforms including Jadaliyya, SAPIENS, Birikim, and ACM Interactions. He has recently received his PhD in Anthropology from University of California-Davis.