Perisa Davutoglu

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science 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, with a focus on political violence, civil wars, forced displacement, and refugee policies. My work has appeared in The Review of International Organizations and International Interactions.

My dissertation examines how host states manage refugee return, the most politically sensitive yet often overlooked dimension of refugee policy. In the first chapter, I develop a new global dataset to measure forced repatriation, identifying cases where refugee return is likely coerced. This measure fills a major gap in existing data and enables systematic analysis of the political, economic, and institutional drivers of repatriation outcomes. The second chapter draws on a pre-registered survey experiment conducted in Turkey, one of the world’s largest refugee-hosting countries, to study how citizens respond to different framings of refugee return. I find that moral and strategic appeals frequently backfire, particularly among respondents with strong anti-refugee views, suggesting that persuasion efforts may have unintended consequences in polarized settings. The third chapter investigates the international dimension of refugee policy by analyzing how migration containment agreements affect human rights accountability. Using text-as-data methods on European Union progress reports, I examine whether cooperation on migration reduces critical oversight of domestic rights practices in partner states.

I address these questions with a multi-method research design that combines cross-national statistical analysis, survey experiments, in-depth interviews, and text analysis. While my research speaks to global debates, I am particularly interested in the politics of the Middle East and North Africa.