Bio
Çağla Demirel is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) at Södertörn University and a visiting scholar at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies (SUITS).
Çağla Demirel completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at Södertörn University in 2023. Her research interests include peace and conflict studies, memory politics, ethnonational identities, collective and competitive victimhood, and reconciliation processes.
Her doctoral dissertation, Analyzing Competitive Victimhood: Narratives of recognition and nonrecognition in the pursuit of reconciliation, examines the role of competitive victimhood in ethnonational reconciliation processes. Drawing on case studies of Turkish–Armenian relations, Republican–Unionist relations in Northern Ireland, and interethnic relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it offers a framework for understanding how groups engage in competitive victimhood at varying levels of intensity, downplaying or denying the suffering of others.
Building on this work, she is currently conducting a postdoctoral project at CBEES entitled Political Pathologies of Victimhood Narratives in Turkey, Serbia and Azerbaijan. The project examines how historical crimes are framed, contested, and compared in political discourse across these countries.
Çağla has published in peer-reviewed journals including Third World Quarterly, Peacebuilding, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and East European Politics. She received a research grant from the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation in 2023 and a Postdoctoral Bridge Grant from the European International Studies Association (EISA) in 2024. She also teaches courses on nationalism in the era of globalization, global governance, and international cooperation and integration.
Alongside her research and teaching, Çağla contributes to academic organisation and collaboration. From 2020 to 2022, she served as the Ph.D. representative on the Board of Peace Research in Sweden (PRIS). From 2023 to 2025, she organised academic events and annual conferences at CBEES. She currently coordinates the Memory Studies Research Platform at Södertörn University, organising scholarly events and facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration.