Ulaş Erdoğdu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University, where he is also pursuing a Master’s degree in Applied Statistics, and a pre-doctoral researcher with the ERC-funded COUNSTER project at Bilkent University. He works primarily on political violence and social science methodology. Before Northwestern, he received his BA and MA degrees in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.

He is broadly interested in the relationship between organised violence and political order — particularly civil wars and insurgencies, state-building, contentious politics and social movements, and political regimes. Methodologically, he focuses on set theory, case selection and casing, theory development, causal mechanisms and explanation, multi-method research design, and the uses and misuses of quantitative data in the social sciences. He also works on conflict and protest event analysis, conceptualisation and operationalisation, and data reliability in violent and authoritarian contexts.

He is currently writing his dissertation, in which he develops a novel typology of civil wars based on the social origins of rebel groups. Using this typology and a multi-method research design, the first part of the dissertation examines how democracy, inequality, and democratisation shape different types of civil war onset. The second part studies how rebel origins influence civil war dynamics, including ideology, warfare, rebel governance, civilian victimisation, conflict duration, intensity, outcomes, and state capacity.

His academic work has been published in the Journal of Peace Research, Review of International Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, Harvard Misinformation Review, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and Birikim. He was awarded the 2024 Best Article Award in Kurdish Studies by the Kurdish Political Studies Program at the University of Central Florida, received an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Kendra Koivu Paper Award from APSA’s Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section, and was shortlisted for the 2026 Cedric Smith Prize awarded by the Conflict Research Society.