Gizem Kaya

Gizem Kaya is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Bilkent University and a pre-doctoral fellow at the COUNSTER project. She received her BA in Political Science and International Relations from Yıldız Technical University and her MA in International Relations from Kadir Has University. She has previously been a research assistant in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University (2024–2026). She has also worked as a research assistant on projects funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK), including “Citizen-Centered Counterterrorism Strategies and Their Effectiveness” (2024–2025) and “Digital Public Diplomacy of Terrorist Organizations: Cases of Syria & Iraq” (2022–2024).

Her research interests include peace and conflict studies, social movements, civilian agency and protest mobilization in conflict-affected settings, environmental peacebuilding, and spatial analysis alongside quantitative and computational social science methods. More specifically, she studies political violence and its outcomes in conflict-affected countries, focusing on how conflict motivations and ethnicity shape the spatial and temporal diffusion of protest, and on the interaction among governments, civilians, and non-state armed and violent criminal groups. Her regional focus concentrates on Latin America and the Middle East.