Sena Yenigün is a third-year PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations at İhsan Doğramacı Bilkent University, where her research examines international status hierarchies, second-tier state behaviour, and the interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy.

Her Master’s thesis, The Golden Snitch: Status-Seeking Strategies of Second-Tier States, the Cases of Canada, South Africa, and India, disaggregates the states just below the Great Power Club into three distinct categories — rising, regional, and middle powers — and argues that a state’s capabilities and role identity together shape its path to recognition. Methodologically, she pairs a five-dimensional measurement of material capabilities with a most-similar-systems comparison of three Commonwealth-linked cases, using process tracing across official national strategy documents, capability data, and policymakers’ discourse to test how capabilities and identity jointly drive the choice between social mobility, social creativity, and — only under persistent status denial — social competition.

Her dissertation extends these questions, asking how domestic political logic and state-level positional interests together shape status-seeking strategy selection among second-tier states. Sena currently serves as a pre-doctoral researcher on COUNSTER and contributes to the design of the project’s expert surveys.