Research

While considerable research exists on the underlying causes of terrorism, the timing of terrorist attacks remains poorly understood. This study argues that terrorist groups strategically exploit transient periods of crisis to strike when their targets are most vulnerable. During moments of crisis, state resources are redirected toward immediate challenges, diminishing the likelihood of prompt retaliation. However, terrorist groups weigh both opportunistic gains and reputational risks when deciding to attack. Attacks during certain crises may carry high reputational costs, creating a tradeoff. The study finds that terrorist activity increases during severe security or economic crises but significantly decreases during severe humanitarian crises.

The Middle East is a region of farreaching importance due to past and current events in global politics. Of the many different dynamics and factors that affect the situation of the Middle East, Islam is especially crucial. Many scholars have recently focused on Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and how they affect the Middle East and beyond. Other movements, arguably of equal importance, have received less academic attention. In Political Islam in Tunisia, Anne Wolf, a doctoral student at Oxford University, brings timely critical attention to the history of Tunisia's primary Islamist movement, al-Nahda.

Why do states adopt divergent cyber governance norms despite shared vulnerabilities in cyberspace? While global connectivity and growing cyber threats encourage cooperation, stark differences in norm support persist, leaving cyberspace fragmented and hindering the establishment of global norms. We argue that state preferences across two key contentious domains of cyber norms—autonomy and security—are shaped by a combination of internal and external threat perceptions and domestic ideological orientation. States facing internal threats tend to emphasize digital sovereignty and content control, while those facing external threats prioritize regulations in the domain of security. We test our theoretical expectations by applying a two-step topic modeling approach combining structural topic modeling and latent Dirichlet allocation to the International Cyber Expression (ICE) dataset from 1998 to 2023. We find strong support for the role of threat type in shaping norm support, while ideological commitments condition states’ willingness to endorse regulation, in both security and autonomy domains.

Refugee integration is a multi-level governance (MLG) issue, which municipalities play a central yet constrained role. This article examines how multi-level governance shapes local-level refugee integration in Turkey and what a structured comparison with Greece and Spain.reveals about the scope of the “local turn.” Drawing on a qualitative most-similar case design, the study situates Turkey within a Mediterranean governance spectrum ranging from highly centralised systems to more decentralised models. While all three countries experienced significant post-2015 refugee arrivals and rely on municipalities as frontline actors, they differ in decentralisation, engagement with international agreements, and the involvement of non-state actors. The article argues that responsibilities for refugee integration have increasingly shifted downward to municipalities without a corresponding transfer of authority or resources. By distinguishing the vertical and horizontal dimensions of MLG, the study demonstrates how similar regional pressures generate divergent municipal capacities.

How do coup outcomes shape the types of repression leaders employ in the aftermath of political crises? While existing research shows that repression often increases following coups, it largely treats post-coup repression as uniform, overlooking strategic variation in its form and severity. This article argues that coup outcomes fundamentally alter political opportunity structures, reshaping the constraints and incentives leaders face and, in turn, their repressive strategies. Successful coups weaken institutional and international constraints, enabling leaders to pursue high-cost, high-benefit repression such as extrajudicial violence to dismantle the old order and consolidate power. Failed coups, by contrast, heighten leaders’ vulnerability while preserving existing legal and institutional frameworks, incentivizing low-cost, legally framed repression designed to neutralize threats while minimizing backlash. We test these claims using a mixed-methods nested analysis. The quantitative component employs a difference-in-differences design with entropy balancing to estimate within-country changes in repression following successful and failed coups. The results show that successful coups are associated with increases in severe, high-cost repression, whereas failed coups produce short-term increases in low-cost coercive practices. Complementary process-tracing case studies of Uganda (1985) and Zambia (1990) illustrate distinct mechanisms through which repression operates under different post-coup opportunity structures.

This study examines how governments deploy conflict assignments as high-stakes loyalty and competence tests for political agents, focusing on provincial governors in Turkey. Drawing on Principal–Agent Theory, I argue that internal conflict enables the state to assess a governor’s willingness to prioritize coercive policies over other administrative considerations and their capability to manage complex security operations, serving as a costly signal of political loyalty and operational competence. Governors are deliberately rotated into conflict-affected provinces, where their performance reveals cues that inform subsequent promotion or removal decisions. To test these claims, I construct an original dataset that extends the Governors of the Ottomans and Turkey (GOT) dataset with new information on post-tenure career trajectories, covering all governors from 1984 to 2025. The analysis shows that gubernatorial shuffling occurs significantly more often in Kurdish-majority regions during periods of intensified counterinsurgency, and that service by compliant agents in these regions increases the likelihood of advancement to higher bureaucratic posts. These findings demonstrate how the state strategically manages its provincial bureaucracy, using conflict-zone experience as a monitoring mechanism for loyalty and competence. The study contributes to broader debates on authoritarian governance, elite circulation, and the institutional strategies through which states manage dissent.

The measurement of human rights remains a central challenge in the academic literature. While scholars have extensively debated the limitations of existing metrics and explored alternative strategies, access to fine-grained and reliable data remains limited, and this access is necessary to test theoretical claims and to develop early warning systems to prevent atrocities. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) offer a novel opportunity to address this gap. This paper presents an innovative approach to human rights data collection by utilizing LLMs to extract daily-level information from reports produced by local non-governmental organizations. Focusing on Turkey as a case study, I compile a dataset of human rights violations spanning the years 2013 to 2023, resulting in approximately 30,000 unique observations. This paper contributes to the ongoing discourse on human rights measurement by introducing a scalable and replicable framework for generating high-resolution data.

How do states allocate coercive authority across distinct security institutions when confronting socially embedded insurgencies? Existing scholarship treats the counterinsurgent state as a unitary actor or focuses on coup-proofing dynamics tied to regime survival, leaving unanswered the question of how states distribute frontline responsibilities across organizationally distinct coercive institutions. This article develops an institutional substitution framework, conceptualizing the state as a portfolio of coercive organizations whose deployment is structured by three jointly necessary but imperfectly aligned imperatives: information acquisition, coercive survivability, and institutional coherence. Where these imperatives collide under embedded insurgent threat, states do not simply militarize—they reallocate frontline exposure across institutions, drawing in particular on hybrid forces such as gendarmeries that bridge police and military mandates. We test this argument using a novel micro-level geocoded dataset of police and gendarmerie installations across Turkish provinces during the conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Consistent with the framework, Kurdish-majority jurisdictions exhibit lower police station density, with remaining stations situated disproportionately in peripheral rather than central urban locations, while gendarmerie presence is comparatively higher and police fatality exposure is correspondingly reduced in high-threat areas. These findings move counterinsurgency scholarship beyond the binary of policing versus militarization and offer a portfolio-based account of internal security governance, with implications for civil–military relations, security sector reform, and the post-conflict durability of state–society relations.