Yusuf Evirgen

I am a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, working on the ERC Consolidator Grant project COUNSTER. The project examines how governments try to weaken non-state armed actors by targeting the constituencies they claim to represent, through both attractive and repressive strategies. Within COUNSTER, I am responsible for collecting data on the concessions and repression strategies that states direct toward these constituencies. To build this data, I web-scrape large text corpora and use large language models to fine-tune local models that extract the relevant information from the text.

Before joining Bilkent, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) at Binghamton University. I received my Ph.D. (2025) and M.A. (2022) in Political Science from Binghamton University, SUNY. I also hold an M.A. in Political Science from the Social Sciences University of Ankara (2021) and a B.A. in Political Science from Işık University (2016).

My research focuses on contentious politics, coups, human rights, and state repression. Broadly, I study when and how leaders employ state apparatuses to repress opposition in authoritarian countries, combining quantitative methodologies with in-depth interviews and fieldwork.

My work has been published in Conflict Management and Peace Science and is forthcoming in Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. My work has been recognized with several awards, including the Northeastern Political Science Association Best Faculty Paper Award in 2024.