Dr. Yusuf Evirgen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University. He completed his Ph.D. in Political Science at Binghamton University (SUNY) in 2025 and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Binghamton’s Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention.
His research examines state repression, coups, human rights, and contentious politics. Broadly, he studies when and how leaders use the state apparatus, including the police, the military, and the bureaucracy, to control opposition in authoritarian settings. His dissertation, “Mapping State Repression: From Political Crises to Daily Control,” studies repression at the macro and micro level, moving from patterns across countries to the internal machinery of control within a single case.
Methodologically, he combines computational and quantitative research with qualitative depth. He builds original datasets using text-as-data methods and large language models, uses causal inference designs to test his arguments, and grounds that work in elite interviews and fieldwork.
His work appears in Conflict Management and Peace Science and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies (forthcoming), and has been featured in The Conversation. He received the Northeastern Political Science Association Best Paper Award in 2024.