My research examines the relationship between organized violence and political order, with a particular focus on civil wars and insurgencies, state-building, contentious politics and social movements, and political regimes. Within these broader areas, my published work has examined a range of questions, including the effects of democratization and foreign intervention on rebel fragmentation, the consequences of rebel leadership decapitation for peace negotiations, and how legal restrictions on protest shape public support for police repression.
Across my projects, I am interested in how institutions, inequalities, and existing structures of power shape the strategies of governments and political challengers, and how these interactions impact macro processes such as regime and state formation. In my work, I combine cross-national statistical analysis, comparative and historical case studies, and original qualitative and quantitative data collection through fieldwork. Alongside my substantive research, I conduct methodological research on theory development, research design, and causal explanation. My methodological interests grew out of observations I made and frustrations I had while conducting empirical research on civil wars.
Dissertation: Rebel Social Origins and the Dynamics of Civil War
My dissertation develops a novel typology of civil wars based on the social origins of rebel groups. I argue that the pre-conflict power and resources of rebel leaders shape both their incentives and capacities to organize armed rebellion, with important consequences for why civil wars begin and how they unfold.
The dissertation consists of seven empirical chapters organized into two parts. Together, they form a single monograph, but each chapter is also designed to stand as an independent journal article. It combines cross-national statistical analysis using a new civil war dataset, comparative case studies, and a wide range of qualitative and quantitative evidence collected during fieldwork in Turkey, particularly on political violence and the transformation of social movements into armed groups in the 1970s.
The first part examines how different dimensions of democracy and inequality shape distinct types of civil war onset, identifies different pathways to civil war onset in democracies, and investigates the processes through which social movements develop into armed rebellions. The second part examines how rebels' social origins shape their ideology, strategies of warfare and governance, and patterns of civilian victimization, as well as conflict duration, intensity, and outcomes.
Together, the two parts demonstrate how the social origins of rebel groups can shape both civil war onset and subsequent conflict dynamics. More broadly, the dissertation highlights important problems of selection, confounding, and collider bias in existing cross-national civil war research and argues that the literature has paid insufficient attention to pre-conflict dynamics and rebel agency.
A second strand of my research examines how governments respond to political challengers and how these responses shape mobilization, public attitudes, and political violence.
In collaborative research with Mert Arslanalp and Deniz Erkmen, we examine how legal restrictions on protest affect public approval of police repression. Drawing on an original survey experiment conducted in Turkey, we show that protest bans can increase public acceptance of subsequent police repression, highlighting the importance of interactions between different forms of state repression. We are extending this research through new projects drawing on an original dataset of protest events in Turkey since 2007 and additional survey evidence.
As a predoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded COUNSTER project at Bilkent University, led by Efe Tokdemir, I also study government strategies toward the civilian constituencies of non-state armed actors. Moving beyond the conventional focus on interactions between governments and armed organizations, we develop a triadic framework that examines how states seek to weaken, sever, or reshape the relationships between armed groups and their actual or potential supporters. In particular, we investigate both repressive and attractive strategies, including coercion, political inclusion, concessions, and development policies, and their implications for civilian responses and conflict dynamics.
What brings together all of my substantive interests is the relationship between political regimes and different forms of political contention. In particular, I try to understand how different types of institutions and inequality shape political challengers' incentives, motivations, and capacities to pursue violent and nonviolent strategies, as well as the conditions under which political mobilization escalates into organized violence. I am also interested in how institutional politics, nonviolent mobilization, and armed insurgency can coexist and interact rather than necessarily substitute for one another. My research on Kurdish political mobilization in Turkey, where electoral participation, mass protests, and armed insurgency have coexisted for decades, has been particularly influential in shaping these interests.Â
Related to these issues and building on several observations that emerged from my dissertation research, I also plan to explore related questions at the international level. In particular, I am interested in how international order shapes the emergence and characteristics of political challengers, especially revolutionary movements, and, conversely, how revolutions and other forms of mobilization from below reshape international order through their effects on domestic politics.
Alongside my substantive research, I work on methodological questions concerning theory development, causal explanation, and research design. My interests include set-theoretic approaches, case selection and casing, causal mechanisms, and multi-method research. I am particularly interested in how researchers develop and refine theories through the study of individual cases, and how decisions about conceptualization, measurement, and case selection shape the explanations we produce.
In a methodological paper currently at the revise-and-resubmit stage, I develop an approach to selecting negative cases for theory development through the concept of nearly realized cases. I argue that examining cases in which an outcome nearly occurred can generate valuable theoretical insights, particularly when researchers compare them with cases in which the outcome was realized. Building on this argument, I plan to write more broadly about how conceptualization, casing, and case selection affect research design and the development of causal explanations. In particular, I plan to examine how variation among negative cases, and researchers' failure to account for this variation, create problems for theory development and research design, with distinct implications for qualitative and quantitative empirical analysis.
I am also interested in the uses and misuses of quantitative data in the social sciences, particularly the challenges of conceptualization, operationalization, event coding, and data reliability in violent and authoritarian contexts. These interests are informed by my experience developing and coding large-scale datasets, designing codebooks and coding protocols, training and managing teams of undergraduate research assistants, and collecting qualitative evidence during fieldwork. These experiences have significantly shaped how I think about methodology and the relationship between data and theory in the social sciences.