Dr. Leo Bauer is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, where he works on the ERC-funded COUNSTER project. He earned his PhD in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2026.

His research examines political violence and civil war, and centres on three closely related areas: the dynamics of rebel–civilian relations in civil war, the link between the origins and behaviour of rebel groups, and broader civil war dynamics — including the link between climate disasters and forced displacement, as well as the conditions under which mediation occurs in self-determination disputes. In his research he uses quantitative methods, computational approaches, and qualitative fieldwork.

His work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research (×2), Social Science Quarterly, International Politics, and German Politics. He is an affiliate researcher with the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Previously, he was a 2025–2026 Civil War Paths Fellow with the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War at the University of York, and served as managing editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution.