Perisa Davutoglu

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pittsburgh and an Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellow for the 2024–2025 academic year. I specialize in international relations and political methodology, focusing on political violence, civil wars, forced displacement, and refugee policies. My work has been published in the Review of International Organizations and International Interactions.

My dissertation focuses on how host states manage refugee return, which is often the most politically sensitive but overlooked aspect of refugee policy. In the first chapter, I build a new global dataset to measure forced repatriation. This measure identifies cases where return is likely coerced, filling a major gap in existing data and enabling systematic analysis of the political, economic, and institutional factors that drive these outcomes. The second chapter draws on a survey experiment conducted in a major refugee-hosting country to examine how citizens respond to different framings of refugee return. The results show that moral and strategic appeals often backfire, particularly among respondents with strong anti-refugee attitudes, suggesting that persuasion may have unintended effects in polarized environments. The third chapter analyzes how international actors respond to refugee containment agreements, focusing on whether they temper human rights criticism in exchange for migration cooperation.

I address these questions using a mix of cross-national statistical analysis, survey experiments, in-depth interviews, and text analysis. While my research has global implications, I am especially interested in the Middle East and North Africa.