In this area of my research, the main questions I strive to answer are: 1) What are the social and political consequences of political violence? 2) Why do civil wars emerge in the form they do, and how are motives of the insurgency and the master cleavages shaped?
Besides my book projects (see below), I have worked on two papers: one on the human cost of war, and the second on terrorism. The first paper (with Onur Bakiner, Seattle University) examines the effect of casualties on support for military response in ongoing ethnic conflicts. We test hypotheses derived from elite-cue vs. event-response theories in a non-US context. This paper is published in Civil Wars.
In the second project, which is supported by an APSA grant, I look at how terrorism impinges on electoral behavior in Turkey. Specifically, I examine the change in incumbent party’s vote shares and turnout rates in response to domestic and international terrorist attacks, using an original longitudinal dataset (1989-2019). This project contributes to research on global governance of terrorism.
I have also worked on reviewing the civil war literature to critically analyze the findings so far in terms of the effects of wars on sociopolitical attitudes and behaviors with Chris Price. Our paper is published in Civil Wars.
Observing how individual experiences with violence varied across provinces with different proximity to violent zones during my fieldwork in Turkey and Peru motivated me to write on different forms of victimization and measurement of exposure to violence. The paper I co-authored with Chris Price published at the International Studies Review.
Book Project 1: Wartime Transformations of Trust in Civil Wars
In my first book project, which is a product of my dissertation research, I explore the implications of civil wars on political and social trust. The manuscript offers a new theory of wartime transformations of trust grounded on fieldwork data from the cases of the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey (1984-) and the Maoist insurgency in Peru (1980-1992) and tests the main hypothesis. My dissertation received an honorable mention for APSA Comparative Democratization Section Best Fieldwork Award.
In the book manuscript, I argue that the geographic and ethnic focus of the war affects the way that trust will be undermined. Wars that do not have a clearly defined ethnic or geographical focus (unrestricted) curtail generalized trust more than restricted civil wars. In restricted civil wars (e.g. ethnic territorial wars), outgroup trust will diminish more visibly. To build and update my theory, I examine the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey as a case of ethnic territorial war (Kurdistan Workers’ Party—the PKK against the Turkish state, 1984-) and the Maoist insurgency in Peru as a case of ideological war (the Shining Path against the Peruvian state, 1980-2000). I conducted more than 60 interviews and 18 focus groups in each country and gathered and analyzed comparative historical and macro-sociological materials. I also test the main hypotheses derived from my theory, using time-series data (1948-2009) from 169 countries. Quantitative testing confirms that unrestricted wars decrease political and generalized trust, while in unrestricted wars the decline is not statistically significant.
A section of the methods chapter of the book discusses the utility of focus groups in gathering high quality qualitative data in conflict contexts, and is published in International Journal of Qualitative Methods.
Book Project 2: States Make Wars: Comparative Historical Analysis of the Origins of Insurgencies
In my second book project, I ask why civil wars emerge in the form they do. Many post-colonial states of Latin America (e.g. Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala) and post-imperial states of the Middle East (Turkey, Lebanon, Syria) have been consumed in a civil war in the last half century, albeit in different forms. Why was the civil war that erupted in Peru (fought between a Maoist insurgency and the Peruvian state) ideological in character while the war in Turkey (fought between the Kurdish insurgents and the Turkish state) ethnic territorial? The literature’s response is pivoted around the differences in grievances (political vs. economic respectively) even though both types of grievances are often at play in both non-ethnic and ethnic wars. Others suggest that mobilization capacity of the insurgents, the leadership, and the master societal cleavages determine the conflict character. However, none of these explain why the war in Peru was not an ethnic territorial one even though all the necessary conditions for a rise of territorial insurgency were in place. I argue that in order to understand why civil wars vary in character, we need to look beyond the political landscape immediately before the onset of the civil war, as part of the answer lies in the legacies of being a post-colonial vs. post-imperial state and the grand strategies of nation-building and state-making.
Employing a comparative historical approach, I plan to use process-tracing method across four contemporary cases of civil wars: ethnic wars in Turkey and Sri Lanka, and nonethnic wars in Columbia and Peru. I focus on protracted wars in democracies (though in different degrees) to control for the regime type. The proposed book cuts across socio-political history to elucidate how choices of nation-building strategies and state-society relations extending from the colonial or imperial times paved the way for the rise of the insurgencies, and shaped their character, affecting the security politics, even after a century.