Ronay Bakan

Ronay Bakan examines the spatiality of violence and resistance in emergencies, ranging from wars to earthquakes, with a particular focus on Kurdish politics in Southwest Asia and North Africa. Ronay Bakan earned her PhD from the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. In 2025-2026, she was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at European University Institute, Florence. She received her BA and MA degrees from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogazici University, Istanbul. In 2018-2019, she was a Fox International Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, New Haven.

My research examines political violence, mobilization, political geography, disaster studies, and critical methodologies, with a regional interest in Southwest Asia. My first book project, titled Counterinsurgent Urbanism: Weaponizing Land and Heritage in Northern Kurdistan, explores the social underpinnings of counterinsurgency and its violence through the dynamics of spatial control. Drawing on my urban ethnography on the 40-year civil war between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish state, I trace a layered set of state policies and interventionist actions, including heritage-making, urban planning, and urban renewal, as part of a broader security strategy. My second book project, tentatively titled The Promise of Peace: War and Violence in UNESCO World Heritage Sites, further applies counterinsurgent urbanism within a global, multi-scalar, and comparative framework. I analyze how states' engagement with international heritage regimes shapes counterinsurgencies in occupied and indigenous lands, while also providing a comparative global analysis of the role of heritage-making and heritage tourism in reorganizing spaces of war and conflict to prevent the formation of insurgencies. As part of my third project, I collaborate with a group of scholars and practitioners including urban planners, architects, and geologists to develop a citizen- and justice-based scientific framework for understanding earthquakes. In this, I specifically focus on ethics and practice of care in disaster preparedness, management, and response. My publications speak to core debates in civil war, counterinsurgency, urban politics, heritage studies, social movements, disaster politics, race and ethnicity, and research methods.