Welcome!
I am an incoming postdoctoral researcher in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, where I will work on the ERC-funded COUNSTER project. I received my PhD in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2026.
My research examines political violence and civil war and centers on three closely related areas. The first concerns the dynamics of rebel-civilian relations in civil war. It includes my dissertation, in which I test a novel theory of rebel-civilian social ties and their effects on violence against civilians, and related work on rebel legitimacy-building. The second examines the link between the origins and behavior of rebel groups, including how organizational legacies shape tactical choice in conflict. The third focuses on broader civil war dynamics, spanning the link between climate disasters and forced displacement as well as the conditions under which mediation occurs in self-determination disputes. In my research I use quantitative methods and measurement models as well as qualitative fieldwork methods. I am also enthusiastic about computational social science and use a variety of computational methods for data generation and analysis.
My work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research (x2), Social Science Quarterly, International Politics and German Politics. I am an affiliate researcher with the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously, I was a 2025–2026 Civil War Paths Fellow with the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York and served as the managing editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Feel free to reach out to me with any question you might have.