Research

Refugees as Citizen-Material: Migration, State Identity, and the Politics of Inclusion

My first book traces these processes from the late Ottoman Empire through contemporary Turkey. Across dramatic transformations in state identity, I examine how successive governments redirected refugee governance toward different demographic and political futures.

The book shows that refugee policy can perform two interconnected functions: demographic engineering, through which states alter the composition of their populations, and identity construction, through which political actors enact competing visions of whom the state represents and what the nation should become. Comparing the treatment of refugees with minorities already living within the state reveals how the characteristics that make one population desirable can simultaneously render another politically suspect.

The project combines comparative-historical analysis with multi-sited archival and interview research. It draws on more than 4,000 archival documents in Ottoman and Modern Turkish, French, and English, and approximately 45 interviews from research in Turkey, Brussels, and Geneva.

Related comparative research extends these questions beyond the book. My work on refugee regularization in Turkey and Colombia examines how governments construct legal frameworks in response to large-scale displacement. Research on the 2020 Turkey–European Union border crisis examines how refugee mobility becomes an instrument of sovereignty, international bargaining, and political identity. Collaborative work on border infrastructure investigates how enforcement redistributes the risks of movement and contributes to migrant mortality.

I also examine how the production of knowledge shapes the politics of protection. In "Lost in Data Translation," published in International Migration, I show how institutional definitions and measurement practices produce different representations of displaced populations. A large-scale meta-analysis of more than 12,000 publications examines geographic inequalities in forced-migration scholarship and asks whose experiences become the basis of knowledge about displacement. Together, these projects show how the categories through which refugees are counted, classified, and studied shape which populations and vulnerabilities become visible to institutions.

My postdoctoral research extends these questions from who belongs to who is protected.

Climate change provides a particularly revealing arena for studying the politics of protection because the institutions governing climate displacement remain far less developed than those surrounding refugees and international migration. As extreme heat, wildfire, flooding, drought, and sea-level rise make places increasingly difficult to inhabit, governments face decisions about whose communities will be protected, who will be enabled to relocate, and who will remain exposed.

My contribution to this interdisciplinary field is to bring the study of membership and migration governance to climate vulnerability. Building on research showing that vulnerability is socially produced, I examine how legal status, mobility regimes, and the boundaries of political community shape who receives protection from environmental risk, alongside infrastructure, housing, settlement patterns, and public policy. Environmental hazards do not automatically produce migration. People's ability to leave dangerous places or remain safely in place is mediated by these same institutions, which can facilitate mobility, enable adaptation in place, or produce forms of immobility that leave already vulnerable populations increasingly exposed.

As a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Advancing Just Societies and a Postdoctoral Researcher at UC San Diego's Center on Global Justice, I bring this framework to questions of climate resilience and displacement in the context of low-probability, high-impact environmental events. Through collaborative projects involving researchers, policymakers, and community stakeholders in California and Massachusetts, I examine how fragmented governance systems allocate protective responsibility and how scientific knowledge about emerging risks becomes actionable in policy.

With Fonna Forman, I also work on the Sanctuary Neighborhood Model, an alternative to refugee encampment that connects refugee reception with investments in climate resilience and receiving communities. Our work in Tijuana approaches displacement, inadequate infrastructure, environmental risk, and community protection as interconnected governance problems.

The politics of protection bridges my research on conflict- and climate-based displacement. Both areas ask how institutions differentiate populations when deciding whose vulnerability generates political obligation, and how those decisions shape the boundaries and inequalities of political communities.