I received my Ph.D. degree in Political Science at the Department of Government, London School of Economics in January 2017. My Ph.D. dissertation, “Collective memory and competition over identity in a conflict zone: the case of Dersim”, explores the causes and mechanisms of ongoing competition over the nature of national identity through a case study of Dersim in the Turkish Republic. I worked on the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria (Rojava Cantons) as a Swedish Institute and Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) in Lund University between September 2017 and 2018. In October 2018 I started as a Marie Curie Fellow at CMES with the FIRE (Fighting Insurgency Ruining Environment) project, which focuses on conflict and the environment in the Middle East.